New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, II
Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992-1996
TexTS & STuOies
Volume 188
Renaissance English Text Society Special Publication
Josephine A. Roberts November 11, 1948-August 26, 1996
New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, II
Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992-1996
edited by W. SPEED HILL
Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies
in conjunction with
Renaissance English Text Society
Tempe, Arizona
1998
© Copyright 1998 Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
New ways of looking at old texts. II : papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992-1996 / edited by W. Speed Hill.
p. cm. — (Medieval & Renaissance texts & studies ; v. 188) (Renaissance Enghsh Text Society special pubUcation) Includes index. ISBN 0-86698-230-2
1. English Uterature — ^Early modem, 1500-1700 — Criticism, Textual. 2. Manuscripts, Renaissance — ^Eng^and — ^Editing. 3. Manuscripts, EngUsh — Editing. 4. Paleography, EngUsh. 5. Renaissance — ^England. I. Hill, W. Speed (William Speed), 1935— . II. Renaissance English Text Society. III. Series. IV. Series: Renaissance English Text Society special pubUcation. PR418.T48N49 1998
820.9 "003— dc21 98-19258
CIP
This book is made to last.
It is set in Bembo, smythe-sewn,
and printed on acid-free paper
to Ubrary specifications.
Printed in the United States of America
To the memory of Josephine A. Roberts
Contents
Preface xi
1992: Problems in the Selection of Copy-Text; chair, Nicolas K. Kiessling
Editing Revised Texts: Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and The Posies
G. W. PIGMAN III 1
Recent Theoretical Approaches to Editing Renaissance Texts, with Particular Reference to the Folger Library Edition of Hooker's Works
W. SPEED HILL 11
Robert Burton's Sources and Late Topical Revision in The Anatomy of Melancholy
THOMAS C. FAULKNER 23
1993: Editing William Tyndale; chair, John T. Day
On Representing Tyndale's English
ANNE RICHARDSON 31
On Editing Queen Katherine Parr
JANEL MUELLER 43
On Editing Foxe's Book of Martyrs
JOHN N. KING 53
Contents
1994: Editing After Poststructuralism; chair, W. Speed Hill
Editing Romeo and Juliet: "A challenge [,] on my life"
JILL L. LEVENSON 61
"Is it upon record?": The Reduction of the History Play to History
PAULWERSTINE 71
Preposterous Poststructuralism: Editorial Morality and the Ethics of Evidence
STEVEN URKOWITZ 83
1995: Editing as Canon Construction: The Case of Middleton; chair, Suzanne Gossett
Judgment
GARY TAYLOR 91
The Children's Middleton
GAIL KERN PASTER 101
"The Lady Vanishes": Problems of Authorship and Editing in the Middleton Canon
JULIA BRIGGS 109
1996: Electronic Technology and Renaissance Materials; chair, G. W. Pigman, III
Editing All the Manuscripts of All The Canterbury Tales into Electronic Form: Is the Effort Worthwhile?
ELIZABETH SOLOPOVA 121
The Application of Digital Image Processing to the Analysis of Watermarked Paper and Printers' Ornament Usage in Early Printed Books
DAVID L. GANTS 133
Electronic Editions and the Needs of Readers
JOHN LAVAGNINO 149
Index 157
Preface
Like its predecessor volume, New Ways of Looking at Old Texts [I]: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991, the present volume, New Ways . . . II (alternate titles considered were: Newer Ways . . . and New Ways . . . The Sequel), prints papers given at the national MLA conventions from 1992 through 1996. It is a sUmmer volume, as it covers five, not six, years, and it includes no occasional lectures. Nonetheless, the claim made on behalf of the earher volume ("read chronologically [the essays] supply a usefiil proxy for developments in the field . . .") remains vaUd for this collection as well. Although thirteen of the fifteen contributors write as practicing editors and all address editorial issues — or, in one case (Gants), bibUographical issues — the topical range is extensive. Recurrent editorial topoi — choice of copy-text (Pigman, Solopova, Levenson), choice of editorial models (Hill, King, Urko- witz, Lavagnino), historical philology and "old speUing" (Richardson), annota- tion (Faulkner, King), the role of external fact (Faulkner, Werstine) — reappear, and newer ones — the impact of poststructuraHsm (Levenson, Urkowitz), canon formation (Taylor, Briggs, Paster), the structure of electronic texts (Lavagnino, Urkowitz), the use of computer-based analysis to construct a stemma (Solo- pova)— make their debuts.
A obvious limitation of such a collection, especially when nearly all its contributors are working editors, is the all but irresistible inclination to con- struct essays on a this-is-what-I-did-and-this-is-why-I-did-it model, as if editing were merely a matter of procedure and methodology, uninfluenced by ideology, detached from wider literary and/ or scholarly issues, comfortably empiricist in its ontology and positivist in its epistemology. Pigman, Levenson, Solopova, and myself fall into that category, but two of us — Pigman and my- self— are responding to the topic set for the session, "Problems in the Selection of Copy-Text," that invited such a rhetoric of response. (At least in my case, the topic is inverted: "whzt-l-didn't-do-znd-why-l-didn't-do-it") Nonetheless,
xii Preface
what is noteworthy about this collection is the range of topics treated that, while prompted by editorial activity, are not usually thought of as "editorial" issues.
On the one hand, Elizabeth Solopova (together with her colleague Peter Robinson) tackles an orthodox problem: what surviving document of the Canterbury Tales should be the basis for establishing a critical text? The prob- lem is defined traditionally as discovering "what Chaucer is likely to have written." The novelty resides in combined power of two computer-based tools of analysis: Robinson's program Collate, and what evolutionary biologists call cladistic analysis ("the systematic classification of groups of organisms on the basis of the order of their assumed divergence from ancestral species," my New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary explains). She concludes that the Heng- wrt, not the Ellesmere, is closer to Chaucer and so should be the basis for a critical text of his Tales. Her aim is not new at all: it is to reconstruct a miss- ing archetype through recensionist analysis of the text in the surviving docu- ments. What is new is the technology brought to bear on the problem. Issues of procedure and methodology are central because of the wealth of that sur- viving documentation. Using hand-eye collation, John Manly and Edith Rick- ert were famously unable to construct a viable stemma for the Canterbury Tales after spending two scholarly lifetimes trying. Solopova's and Robinson's claim that they have — or at least are demonstrably on their way to doing so — ^will doubtless be scrutinized by other working editors of Chaucer, but their claim of success is nonetheless arresting — and disturbing, for it means "that the tens of thousands of students who every year read the Canterbury Tales in the River- side Chaucer, based on Ellesmere, are reading a text at many points far re- moved from what Chaucer is likely to have written" (128).
On the other hand, the entire panel for 1995, "Editing as Canon Con- struction: The Case of Middleton" assesses the impact on the canon of Renais- sance drama of the forthcoming Oxford edition of Middleton's complete works. Provocatively suggesting that, pace Shakespeare, you can no longer have it both ways, its general editor, Gary Taylor, asserts that Middleton's moral realism has been unfairly overshadowed by his older canonical contem- porary. Still, one of the Middleton editors, Gail Kem Paster, reads the promo- tion of Middleton to the status of a romantic "author" of a "collected works" against the grain of Taylor's campaign to secure for Middleton a higher perch on the canonical ladder by showing why the plays written for the boys of St. Paul's ought not to be lumped with plays written for the adult players of the King's Men. Her essay, "The Children's Middleton," emerges from her careful reconstruction of a very local context — St. Paul's Cathedral and its immediate precincts — as sub-genre within a collected works that inevitably incorporates every item as a "work" of one "author." Yet another Middleton editor, Julia
Preface ' xiii
Briggs, is quite happy to welcome The Second Maiden's Tragedy (or The Lady's/ Ladies' Tragedy) back into the canon of Middleton's authentic works, not only for the interest of the play itself for contemporary academic audiences, but because by subsuming it under the category of "author" and by revising the chronology of his "works," its text may be read afresh, and a developmental arc constructed for an authorial oeuvre based on that new chronology. Canon formation is not usually thought of as an editorial issue, but as Taylor inven- tively reiterates, it is in fact the foundation of editing: which author do you edit? which plays/texts do you include, and which do you exclude? which at- tributions do you accept or reject? which multiple-text plays do you accord multiple-version status within an edition? which parts of jointly authored texts do you print, and under whose name? All these are questions editors routinely face, though rarely are they articulated so clearly.
Nothing would seem more removed from the tedious chores of collation, computer-assisted or manual, that are the foundation of the editor's activities than the heady speculations of poststructuralism. Yet for over two millennia editors have lived with issues of fragmentahsm, multiple versions, authorial as well as textual indeterminacy, and intertextuaUty. From the vantage point of the textual critic, it is the poststructuralists who are late to the feast. StUl, it is one thing to argue that Romeo and Juliet is an indeterminately multiple text (as Jonathan Goldberg has); it is something quite different to accommodate that textual multipUcity to the demands of a commercial pubHsher's series specifica- tions. Just how the two — ^poststructuralist speculation and textual specificity — intersect is the burden of Jill Levenson's account of what she did editing the Oxford Romeo and Juliet. The same pairing, poststructurahst analysis and tex- tual specificity, form the warp and woof of Paul Werstine's meditation on the Shakespeare's historical anachronisms. He takes editors to task for correcting history in Richard III as if the Bard were a beginning undergraduate major in history who somehow couldn't get his facts straight and needed a professorial vetting to sort out names, tides, and chronology. The issue is a perennial one, codified by G. Thomas Tanselle {SB 29) in "External Fact as an Editorial Problem"; Werstine treats it with a deft sophistication. That the multiplicities poststructuralism authorizes can in turn authorize a variety of theatrical inter- pretations is Steve Urkowitz's theme, as he teases a pair of textual variants in King Lear into multiple interpretive possibilities. In oral deUvery as a confer- ence paper, Urkowitz's varying intonations of the Une variously given Gloucester (Quarto) and "Cor." (FoHo [Cornwall? CordeUa?]), "Heere's France and Burgundy, my Noble Lord," dispute Derrida's preference for writ- ing over speech, for there is no way to notate in the impoverished medium of print the nuanced differences between each of the four ways a textually identical sentence was actually delivered. Though not a working editor —
xiv Preface
indeed, he has positioned himself as of the school of "unediting" — Urkowitz suggests that the riches of the CD-ROM medium ought to release from a work a multiplicity of textual options heretofore imprisoned in the limitations of the printed codex format of a single text subscribed with cryptic textual notes below.
In reviews of the earUer New Ways volume, Tim William Machan (TEXT 9) and David Greetham (MP 93) each remarked on the underlying consensus of its contributors that the issues occupying contemporary editors were now being refracted through the socialized editing model of Jerome McGann and not the intentionalist one of Greg, Bowers, and Tanselle. That consensus is not evident in this volume. All three editors in the 1992 session work within the older paradigm, adjusting it to the requirements of the author being edited. G. W. Pigman bases his Oxford edition of Gascoigne's poems on his A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres even though it admittedly does not represent Gas- coigne's "final intentions," as The Posies does. The Faulkner-Kiessling— Blair text of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is based on the fourth edition (1632), as it is the one most comprehensively realizing the evolving intentions of Bur- ton's Hfe work. That copy-text is emended from the 1638 and 1651 editions (the last posthumous), where Burton has added material or revised his text. Nothing could be more orthodox. Faulkner's paper supplies examples of Bur- ton's own on-going engagement with the religious/political issues of the day, notably the Sabbatarian controversy, as revealed in the revisions that textual collation has filtered out from the huge textual corpus. Janel Mueller's edition of the writings of Queen Katherine Parr focuses more narrowly on the work of an individual author. To do so she situates Parr circumstantially in her own very local social world as the sixth wife of Henry VIII. As I observed in the introduction to New Ways [I] (23), editors of women's writings in the early modem period resist having their newly recovered authors subsumed within a leveling socialization of authorship, and the recovery of individual authorial intention remains foundational for their editions.
On another scale entirely, how can one individuate authorial intention from socialized welter of John Foxe's martyrology, the "Book of Martyr's" — a "book" that is less codex than archive? John N. King's survey of the problems of editing such a work is sobering, and one can only hope that those now at work on it in England have some theoretical as well as methodological grasp of the issues involved. To be sure, procedure and methodology will always be a refuge when the data threaten to overwhelm the editor, as is surely the case with Foxe's juggernaut, but editing is more than accuracy of transcription and fidelity to the document at hand. Even with the reproductive powers of the CD-ROM and the disseminatory potential of the Internet, an archive does not an edition make, as John Lavagnino acutely observes. For the edited work
Preface ' xv
to be truly accessible (as the technology keeps promising it will), it needs an editorial infrastructure of introductions, commentary, glosses, chronology, line-numbers, etc., if the reader/user is to be well served. An editorial proto- col suited to displaying the well-wrought urn behind modernist glass — as the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle model was superbly designed to do, is unlikely to serve so well when the artifact is Foxe's gargantuan archive.
Although the profession seems bent on ghettoizing editing as it has bibli- ography, the evidence of the papers in this collection suggests that there is in practice more permeabihty between the world of the interpreter and the world of the editor than is generally acknowledged. Textual critics turn out to be astute hermeneuts, and critics are beginning to realize the interpretive utiU- ty of the materials that editorial inquiry turns up. Indeed, most editors do not start out professionally to be or become editors. Rather, they encounter mat- erial in the course of their research that begs to be edited — the heretofore largely invisible writings of early modem women are a salient example, as is Foxe's all too visible "Book of Martyr's." Such scholars become editors in mid-career, driven by their interest of works heretofore inaccessible. Such edi- tors do not stop interpreting when they start editing. To be sure, they may be curtailed in their speculations by the irreducible facticity of the textual data (or absence of textual data) and the stubbornly material limitations of the surviv- ing documents (although the paucity of surviving evidence has not noticeably inhibited Shakespearean editors). But, by the same token, their editorially de- rived speculations have — ^potentially, at least — an evidential basis that is firmer and more carefiiUy drawn than that found in many contemporary new histori- cist meditations unanchored in the textual history of the texts under review.
This, I would argue, is the intellectual rationale for the present collection. The papers included in this volume do not merely Ust or cite items of textual data; rather, they use these data as the foundation for searching discussions of interpretive issues that necessarily must be revisited, again and again: not merely "what the author wrote," but which author? when did he or she write it? what did he or she intend to mean? who was the audience then? since? now? what was the reception? and how are all these issues to be incorporated in the editions we produce and read? These quite traditional issues are all the more pertinent to a world where poststructuralist critiques have questioned many traditional editorial procedures and goals.
The frontispiece and dedication of this volume are whoUy inadequate tes- timony to the debt all scholars and editors of Renaissance texts owe Jo Roberts whose tragic death on August 26, 1996, left us all shaken. As the
xvi Preface
editor of The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (1983) and The First Part of The Coun- tess of Montgomery's Urania (1995), she was at work on the latter's manuscript continuation at the time of her death. That important work is being contin- ued by the Society (principally by Janel Mueller and Suzanne Gossett) in respectful tribute to our memory of her as a person and to her professional contributions to the field.
W. SPEED HILL
Editing Revised Texts:
Gascoigne's A Hundredth Sundrie Flowres
and The Posies
G. W. PIGMAN III
OVER THE PAST FIFTEEN YEARS THE CONTROVERSY CONCERN- ing Shakespearean revision has increased awareness about some of the problems involved in editing revised texts. Those who beUeve that the Foho King Lear is Shakespeare's own revision of an earHer version of the play, represented by the first Quarto, insist that editors should not conflate the two versions, as has been customary since the eighteenth century.' As a general principle I would agree that one should not conflate distinct versions of a text, but determining in individual cases just what constitutes conflation is often no easy task. Moreover, Shakespeare's stature obscures a practical problem facing editors of less important authors. Since the market can bear separate editions of the Quarto and FoHo Lear, one need not choose between them. An editor of George Gascoigne does not have the luxury of printing both the first and second editions.^ But even if one did, one might choose
' Stanley Wells, "Introduction: The Once and Future King Lear," in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (1983; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 1-22, and Grace loppolo. Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), 19—43.
^ When electronic editions become more sophisticated and more accepted, this practical difficulty will disappear, but at present they pose their own problems, not the least of which is expense. For an acute discussion of electronic editions, see John
2 G. W. PIGMAN III
not to. For it is difficult to decide whether A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and The Posies are two different works or two editions of the same work. I shall argue that they should be regarded as different works, even though the text of most of the pieces from the first edition remains substantially the same in the second. Regarding the two editions as separate works then raises the problem of conflation, since Gascoigne's revisions fall into two classes that can be easily distinguished sometimes but not at others: revisions designed to make an individual work conform to a new conception of the work as a whole and revisions designed to improve the individual work as an individual work. I try to accept into my text only those variants from the second edition that appear to be Gascoigne's revisions and that appear only to affect the individual work as an individual work. By choosing not to use the revised edition as copy- text, I have had to confront another problem that bedevils the editor of revised texts, and I shall try to justify my decision not to use the edition that definitely represents Gascoigne's final intention.^
In 1573 and 1575 Gascoigne published two collections of his work that differ in three major ways. First, the 1573 edition is presented as an anthology on the order of Tottel's Songes and Sonettes. No author or editor is mentioned on the title page, which reads: A Hundreth sundrie Flowres bounde up in one small Poesie. Gathered partely (by translation) in the fyne outlandish Gardins of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and others: and partly by invention, out of our oume fruitefull Orchardes in Englande: Yelding sundrie sweete savours of Tragical, Comical, and Morall Discourses, bothe pleasaunt and profitable to the well smellyng noses of learned Readers.^ Curiously placed prefatory letters explain that one H. W. is responsible for printing this collection of "divers discourses and
Lavagnino, "Reading, Scholarship, and Hypertext Editions," TEXT 8 (1995): 109-124.
^ My edition is scheduled to appear in the Oxford Enghsh Texts of Oxford Uni- versity Press. The first two editors of Gascoigne use The Posies as their copy-text; the next two use A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, although neither one includes the plays: The Complete Poems of George Gascoigne, ed. WilUam Carew Hazhtt (London: Whittingham & Wilkins, 1869-70); The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. CunUfFe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1907-10); A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres From the Original Edition, ed. B. M. Ward (London: Etchells and MacDonald, 1926; 2nd edition with additions by Ruth Lloyd Miller, Jennings, LA: Minos PubHshing, 1975); George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. C. T. Prouty (Columbia, MO: Univ. of Missouri, 1942). All citations from Gascoigne are from my edition, but I give page references to the first volume of CunlifFe's.
^ Both editions acknowledge that Francis Kinwelmarsh translated parts ofjocasta and that Christopher Yelverton wrote its epilogue, but the plays are not presented as part of the anthology introduced by H. W.'s and G. T.'s letters, and no author in the anthology, except for Gascoigne himself, is named.
Editing Revised Texts 3
verses, invented uppon sundrie occasions, by sundrie gendemen" (490).^ The tide page of The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire immediately drops the pretense of multiple authorship, and in three prefatory letters Gascoigne justifies the repubUcation of his work. Second, The Posies is almost a quarter longer than A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres.^ Third, although Gascoigne changed the order of the works and most of their titles, he hardly revised any of the texts, except to correct a few errors and, occasionally, to improve a phrase. Hence the texts of the two plays. Supposes and Jocasta, and of eighty-six poems are substantially the same. Only The Adventures of Master F. J. is thoroughly revised; it becomes The pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeronomi and Leonora de Valasco, translated out of the Italian riding tales of Bartello — a fable with a heavily morahstic beginning and ending. Outside of Master F. J. only two poems differ significandy because of revisions. Antipapist sentiments are removed from "A gloze upon this text, Dominus iis opus habet" and from "Councell given to master Bartholmew Withipoll."
It is easy to see that The Posies is an enlarged edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and that Master F. J. has been extensively revised, but that still leaves the bulk of the first edition more or less unchanged. One might say that those minor changes make no difference to the individual works, especially when they are read in isolation, as is usually the case. But the context places many of the poems in a new light because the organization of the two editions dif- fers dramatically. A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres is an anthology by diverse gende- men without patent moral intent, while The Posies is a record of Gascoigne's misspent youth, a warning to others that marks the reformation of this prodi- gal son.
I do not mean to imply that Gascoigne never morahzes in the first edition; the whole question of Gascoigne's reformation is more complicated than
^ It should be noted in passing that there are a number of hints that the collection might be Gascoigne's work and not an anthology, especially the headnote to the first poem in the avowedly Gascoigne section of "The devises of sundrie Gendemen": "I will now deliver unto you 50 many more of Master Gascoignes Poems as have come to my hands, who hath never beene dayntie of his doings, and therfore I concede not his name" (478; my emphasis).
* The Posies adds three prefatory letters, a number of commendatory venes with Gascoigne's response to them, four poems (including "Dulce Bellimi inexpertis," which is almost 1,900 Hues long), the conclusion of "Dan Bartholmew of Bathe" (marked incomplete in A Hundreth Sundrie Flou/res), and "Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in Engjish." It omits five poems as well as the original prefatory matter.
4 G. W. PIGMAN III
Prouty and others have thought.^ The first edition's "The Printer to the Reader" — a letter Gascoigne wrote himself — contains a concise statement of a traditional defense that will dominate the prefatory letters to the second edition: "... the discrete reader may take a happie example by the most lascivious histories, although the captious and harebrained heads can neither be encoraged by the good, nor forewarned by the bad" (476).^ But in 1573 this defense is more or less an aside, certainly not the organizing principle it will become two years later in the prefatory letters to The Posies: "bicause I have (to mine owne great detriment) mispent my golden time, 1 may serve as ensample to the youthfiiU Gendemen of England, that they runne not upon the rocks which have brought me to shipwracke" (14; cf 12—14, 16-17). The division of The Posies into flowers (more pleasant than profitable), herbs (moral discourses more profitable than pleasant), and weeds (medicinal if righdy handled as warnings) is the structure Gascoigne creates to try to guide the reader toward the right use of his exemplary writings (13). This emphasis on the exemplary nature of Gascoigne's youthfiil follies coexists somewhat uneasily with a disavowal of the personal, for in 1575 he also contends that he wrote the greater part of the love poetry for other men (16). In any event, the desire to transform the personal into the exemplary motivates a number of
'^ C. T. Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942), 78-100. Cf. Richard C. McCoy, "Gascoigne's 'Poemata castrata': The Wages of Courdy Success," Criticism 27 (1985): 29-55.
^ Prouty assumes that the printer wrote "The Printer to the Reader," but the evi- dence for • Gascoigne's authorship is overwhelming. First and foremost, if Henry Bynneman had written a letter to be included in the preliminaries (a letter that was printed after the rest of the book had gone through the press), he would have known that "H. W. to the Reader" does not appear "in the beginning of this worke" (476) but rather after the two plays, more than 100 pages into the work. It is much more likely that Gascoigne wrote the letter, unaware that the plays would come first. Second, the letter elaborates the extended metaphor of the book as a collection of flowers, Gascoigne's "invention" in both the first and second editions. Third, the letter is just the kind of mystification that Gascoigne would enjoy and that makes his work so charming. He creates a fictive printer to cast suspicion upon one fiction — unwilling pubUcation — while continuing another — G. T.'s collection of the devises of sundry gendemen. Finally, "H. W. to the Reader" contains a strong hint that the printer is fictitious. H. W. refers to him as "my friend A. B." (490); the initials "A. B." are often used to mean "John Doe" (Fredson Thayer Bowers, "Notes on Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and The Posies," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Uterature 16 [1934]: 13-14; England's Helicon 1600, 1624, ed. Hyder Edward RoUins [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935], 2: 67; Franklin B. Williams, Jr., "An Initi- ation Into Initials," Studies in Bibliography 9 [1957]: 165).
Editing Revised Texts 5
small revisions,' and one group of barely revised poems shows why one should regard the two collections as distinct works even when the texts are almost identical.
In A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres all of the poems presented as Gascoigne's have his name in the tide. Since the collection is supposed to be an antholo- gy, the reason for this inclusion is clear. In The Posies, however, the author of the entire book has been identified, so one wonders why he retains his name in some tides but removes it firom others. Most of the titles from which he removes his name belong to a group of poems at the beginning of the collec- tion, and a plausible explanation can be given for them. The Posies opens with the prefatory letters, the commendatory poems, and finally two poems by Gascoigne himself. In the first he defensively offers further justification for the "weeds" in the collection; in the second, "His ultimum vale to Amorous verse," he vows to pubhsh no more love poetry. A reader who has made it this far has hardly been favorably disposed to lovers or love poetry. A table of contents for the first division, "Flowers," immediately follows; the first nine items all contain the phrase, "of a lover," beginning with "The Anatomie of a Lover" and ending with "The recantacion of a lover." Not one of the tides in the first edition contains the phrase.
The texts of this group (37—52) have nineteen substantive variants, most of which are on the order of "this" for "his" and are correcting errors that crept into the first edition or are introducing new errors into the second. Only three variants look like revisions, and two of these reinforce the revisions to the titles: Gascoigne removes his last name from the last hnes of "The Passion of a Lover" and "The Lullabie of a Lover." He does not try to eUminate the personal completely; he allows his first name to stand in "The arraigment of a Lover" and "The recantacion of a lover." Nevertheless, the pattern is clear. The particularity of Gascoigne's experience gives way to the exemplary experience of "a lover." What is now the first poem of "Flowers" begins: "To make a lover knowne, by playne Anatomie, / You lovers all that hst beware, lo here behold you me" (37). That exemplarity was present in the first edition, but the prefatory insistence that "I might yet serve as a myrrour for unbrydled youth, to avoyde those perilles which I had passed" (5) makes it more difficult to hear the playful humor of "Gascoigns Anatomie. The
' Cf John Stephens, "George Gascoigne's Posies and the Persona in Sixteenth Century Poetry," Neophilologus 70 (1986): 130, and G. K. Hunter, "Drab and Golden Lyrics of the Renaissance," in Forms of Lyric, ed. Reuben A. Brower (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), 12.
6 G. W. PIGMAN III
movement from folly to renunciation now dominates what has become a se- quence, and the overall effect resembles what happens to the much more ex- tensively revised Master F. J. In the words of George Whetstone's defense of Gascoigne: "And sure these toyes, do showe for your behoof / The woes of loove, and not the wayes to love."^°
If you suspect that I prefer the unrevised, less moraUzed version of Gascoigne 's work and that my preference influences my decision to use the first edition as copy-text, you are right. But there is also reason to suspect that, regardless of the sincerity of Gascoigne's presentation of himself as a repentant prodigal from 1575 until the end of his life four years later, he was annoyed at having to yield to external pressure to defend and revise his work. The prefatory letters make it abundantly clear that the major motivation for the revisions in The Posies was, in fact, external — an only too justified fear of censorship. On 13 August 1576, "by appointment of the Q. M. Commission- ers," Richard Smith, the publisher of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and TTie Posies, returned "half a hundred of Gascoignes poesies" to the Stationers' Hall.^^ But in any event, there can be no doubt that concern over the re- ception of the first edition and fear for the second influenced the revisions. The evidence for Gascoigne's annoyance at having to revise comes from some revisions that call the whole project of revision into question.
In his letter "To the reverende Divines" Gascoigne declares: "I under- stande that sundrie well disposed mindes have taken offence at certaine wan- ton wordes and sentences passed in the fable of Ferdinando Jeronimi, and the Ladie Elinora de Valasco" (7). He goes on to assure them that Master F. J. has been "gelded from all filthie phrases," to use his words earlier in the letter (6). Given this assurance of Poemata castrata, the sexual pun in the revised tide is
^° A Rembraunce of the wel imployed life, and godly end, of George Gaskoigne Esquire, who deceased at Stalmford in Uncolne Shire the 7. of October. 1577 (London: E. Aggas, 1577), lines 77-78.
'^ Records of the Court of the Stationers' Company 1576 to 1602 from Register B, ed. W. W. Greg and E. Boswell (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1930), 86-87. Two other books were returned at the same time, but both were redelivered to their publishers. As Greg remarks (Ivii— Iviii), the reasons for the confiscation of Gascoigne's work are obscure. Prouty, George Gascoigne, 79, thinks that A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres was also banned by the Commissioners, but this remains a speculation as records for the period are missing.
Editing Revised Texts 7
startling: "the Italian riding tales. "*^ Apparently Gascoigne is mocking the reverend divines with ungelded, but plausibly deniable, puns.
In the letter to the divines Gascoigne also defends himself against the charge that Master F. J. was "written to the scandalizing of some worthie per- sonages" (7). Since The pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeronomi and Leonora de Valasco, translated out of the Italian riding tales ofBartello presents itself as a trans- lation, Gascoigne could easily have rebutted the charge of representing English contemporaries, but he does not even mention Bartello in the prefatory let- ters. This reticence suggests that one should not take Bartello seriously, and the conclusion to "Dan Bartholmew of Bathe," which is marked as incom- plete in the first edition, gives the game away:
Bartello he which writeth ryding tales, Bringes in a Knight which cladde was all in greene. That sighed sore amidde his greevous gales, And was in hold as Bartholmew hath beene. But (for a placke) it maye therein be seene. That, that same Knight which there his griefes begonne. Is Batts owne Fathers Sisters brothers Sonne. (136)
This stanza is dizzying, a good example of Gascoigne's love of mystifying demystification. As Gascoigne tells us in "Dulce Bellum inexpertis," he was known in the Netherlands by the nickname "the Green Knight" (166). "Bar- tello" sounds like Bartholomew, and one passage even reads "Battello," an Italianization of "Batt" (375). Three personae — ^Bartello, the Green Knight, Dan Bartholomew— are collapsing into one person, George Gascoigne. It would take an aAvfully naive reader not to see Bartello as a fiction. ^^
Gascoigne also casts doubt upon the transposition of the revised Master F. J. from England to Italy. As soon as he sets the scene in Italy, he returns to England, "And bicause I do suppose that Leonora is the same name whiche wee call Elinor in English, and that Francischina also doth import none other than Fraunces, I will so entitle them as to our own countriemen may be moste
^^ The OED defines "ride" as "to mount the female; to copulate" (3; cf 16) and "tail" as "sexual member; penis or (oftener) pudendum" (5c). Helge Kokeritz, Shake- speare's Pronunciation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953), 149, observes that "tale"/ "tail" is "one of Shakespeare's favorite bawdy puns." In "The lover being disdaynfiiUy abjected by a dame of high calling," Gascoigne, probably recalling Wyatt's "Ye old mule," hurls the insult: "He rydes not me, thou knowest his sadell best" (458).
*^ One not need, however, take the next step and conclude with Prouty, George Gascoigne, 218-229, that the stanza shows that "Dan Bartholmew" and Master F.J. are autobiographical.
8 G. W. PIGMAN III
perspicuous" (384).''^ A few lines later Gascoigne casts further suspicion on the Italian setting. Master F. J. takes place in the north of England, and F. J. uses a standard Petrarchan conceit in his first letter to Elinor: "... con- sideringe the naturall clymate of the countrie, I muste say that I have found fire in firost" (384). In the second edition Ferdinando is a Venetian who visits the Lord of Valasco's castle near Florence, which is presumably not much colder than Venice. One might not notice anything strange, if it were not for the marginal note added to the second edition: "The ayre of that Countrie did (by all likelyhood) seeme colder to him than the streetes of Venice." Given that Gascoigne could have picked any Italian cities he liked — F. J. might have come firom Naples, for example, a hotter city that Lyly would use as the scene of licentiousness a couple of years later — the decision to make the south colder than the north certainly looks like a joke hinting that a translation firom the ItaHan is a fiction.
But regardless of whether Gascoigne resented having to revise and defend his work, revise it he did — and not to the satisfaction of his modem critics. Master F. J. is regarded as Gascoigne's most important work, and almost every- one who has expressed an opinion prefers the first to the revised edition. ^^ In the second edition the story becomes simpler firom both a moral and a nar- rative point of view. The moralistic beginning and ending reduce A Discourse of the Adventures to a Fable warning against lust. Without F. J.'s fiiend G. T. as narrator the story is clearer, less mysterious, but it has lost the human interest provided by G. T.'s amused sympathy for the adolescent F. J. and partiality for Dame Fraunces. Instead, we are left with the woes of love — F. J. consigned to a life of debauchery, and Fraunces dying firom grief at his ingratitude.
Moreover, Master F. J. is not the only work to sufier from revision. Per- haps out of a desire to conciliate the Catholic Viscount Montague, who had commissioned a masque and obtained a seat in Parliament for him, Gascoigne revised some lines in "Councell given to master Bartholmew Withipoll." By changing the third "P" which Withipoll is to avoid in Italy from "Papistrie" to "piles and pockes," Gascoigne spoils the climax of the first version, in which poison harms blood and bones, pride poisons body and mind, and
''* I owe this observation about the English names to Gillian Austen, "The Literary Career of George Gascoigne: Studies in Self-Presentation" (Oxford University, D. Phil, thesis, 1996), 151.
'^ Robert P. Adams, "Gascoigne's 'Master F. J.' as Original Fiction," PMLA 12> (1958): 315; Leicester Bradner, "Point of View in George Gascoigne's Fiction," Studies in Short Fiction 3 (1965): 21; Paul Salzman, An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). One partial exception is Walter Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), 98.
Editing Revised Texts 9
papistry defiles body and soul widi "fouler faultes" (347). In The Posies it is not clear in what way "piles and pockes" are worse than poison and pride.
Finally, the division of The Posies into "Floures to comfort, Herbes to cure, and Weedes to he avoyded" (17) serves the moral purpose that Gascoigne outlines in his prefatory letters but is often perplexing in practice. Why, for example, should the translation of the psalm "De profundis" be placed among the more pleasant than profitable flowers instead of the herbs, the moral discourses? Or why should a sequence of six adulterous poems (46—49) or "Dan Bartholmew of Bathe" not join Master F.J. among the weeds? One indication of the arbi- trariness of some assignments is that "A gloze upon this text, Dominus iis opus hahet," appears among both the flowers and the weeds. The arrangement oi A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres as an anthology suits the firankly miscellaneous nature of the collection much better than the moral signposting of The Posies.
Desperate for patronage and afiraid of giving further ofience, Gascoigne gelded A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres of more than filthy phrases, and his hints that the new Master F. J. is not the translation it purports to be suggest that he felt, at the very least, ambivalent about his revisions. I would Hke to believe that without external pressure Gascoigne would not have revised his work, but, of course, I cannot be sure of that, since at least a part of Gascoigne — and before 1575 — felt some sympathy with the moralizing conception of literature that he uses to organize The Posies. Nevertheless, not being able, like an editor of Shakespeare, to print both editions, I have had to choose and have chosen the ungelded edition even though it does not represent Gascoigne's final intentions.
Recent Theoretical Approaches
to Editing Renaissance Texts,
with Particular Reference to the
Folger Library Edition of Hooker's Works
W. SPEED HILL
THE INITIAL PROSPECTUS FOR THE FOLGER LIBRARY EDITION OF Richard Hooker's Works was composed Thanksgiving Friday, 1967, and the "Statement of Editorial Policy" is dated June 1, 1970. But its intellectual orgins go back a decade earHer to values inculcated by the gradu- ate EngUsh department of Harvard University 1957-1964. The reigning fig- ures in the nondramatic Renaissance there, then, were Douglas Bush, known among the graduate students as Mr. Christian Humanism,' and Herschel Baker, author of magisterial surveys of Renaissance intellectual history. The Dignity of Man (Cambridge, 1947) and The Wars of Truth (Cambridge, 1952).^ Older presences were Hyder Rollins, editor of EUzabethan poetic miscellanies, and George Lyman Kittridge, editor of Shakespeare. The latter two repre-
' See The Renaissance and English Humanism (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1939; rpt. 1941, 1956, 1858, 1962, 1965, and 1968), and English Uterature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
^ The Dignity of Man was reprinted in paper as The Image of Man by Harper in 1961; both were originally printed by Harvard University Press.
12 W. SPEED HILL
sented the older philological tradition, as Baker and Bush represented the newer mode of intellectual history. Rollins and Baker had recently collaborat- ed on their anthology, The Renaissance in England (Boston, 1954). In a tone of unassailable certitude, they remark that "the great Tudor translations of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Hooker's Of the Laws of Ealesiastical Polity have a timeless beauty" (150). In the same year — and in the same vein — C. S. Lewis praised Hooker for his having "to our endless joy, [drawn] out all the tranquil beauty of the old philosophy."^
Behind that graduate experience lay four undergraduate years at Princeton where the New Criticism was the dominant critical mode, available in the person of R. P. Blackmur, and behind that, three years at Episcopal High School, where I studied literature from a classic New-Critical text. An Approach to Literature (1952), edited by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. The dominant editorial theory of the era, the copy-text theories of W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, and G. Thomas Tanselle (I was later to learn) was rooted in the New-Critical assumptions of the 1950s and '60s, when I came of textual age, and it flourished in a critical cUmate that valorized "the text itself'"*
Actually, though I was not aware of it at the time, there were three available editorial models in the late 1960s: Documentary editions, Lach- mannian stemmatic editions, and Greg-Bowers copy-text editions. But the reigning mode was copy-text editing: R. B. McKerrow was John the Baptist; W. W. Greg, Jesus Christ; and Fredson Bowers, St. Paul. Bowers's article, "Textual Criticism," for the 1963 MLA guide, The Aims and Methods of Schol- arship in Modem Languages and Literatures, edited by James Thorpe, staked out his claim to evangeUze us textual gentiles. It has thirty-five footnotes: ten cite Bowers's own writing; an additional twelve draw on his various editorial proj- ects. To be sure, the E.E.T.S. continued to issue its documentary editions; for example, Clarence Miller's, of Thomas Chaloner's translation of The Praise of Folie (Oxford, 1965) and William A. Ringler's of Sidney's Poems (Oxford, 1962), edited in exemplary Lachmannian fashion, but Bowers's self- assumed role of bibliographical-textual-editorial advocate assured that his views would dominate debate — as indeed they continue to do in Williams and Abbott's Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, pubUshed by the MLA in 1985 (2nd ed., 1989).
■* English Literature of the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 449.
^ See D. C. Greetham, "Textual and Literary Theory: Redrawing the Matrix," Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 1 and n. 3
Recent Theoretical Approaches 13
An anecdote will illustrate Bowers's hegemonic presence. O. B. Hardison, Jr., godfather of the Folger Edition, suggested we sign on Bowers as "Textual Consultant." My nominee, Dick Sylvester, Executive Editor of the Yale St. Thomas More Edition, declined the appointment, pleading that he lacked the quahfications — surely a tribute to Bowers's success in presenting textual criticism as a mystery open only to the bibUographically adept. So I wrote Bowers, who repUed that for $1,000 he would vet the editorial principles of the edition, and individual volumes for an additional $1,000 per volume. As none of the contributing editors were being so remunerated, and as I privately regarded his offer as indemnification against one of his notorious slash-and- bum reviews, we rejected his offer. Still, for one educating himself in the editing of vernacular texts in the late 1960s, Bowers' authority — and that of copy-text editing — ^was pervasive. There really was no alternative.
As the actual editing evolved, however, we discovered there were alter- natives. Books I— IV of the Lawes exist as a single printed edition, so, in effect, Georges Edelen's text is a "best-text" edition.^ My edition of Book V is an orthodox copy-text edition, employing the printer's copy, a scribal transcript corrected by Hooker, as copy-text. However, I had my misgivings at the time as to the adequacy of copy-text theory to the editing of Renaissance texts that exist in manuscript as well as printed forms. ^ Paul Stanw^ood's texts of Books VI and VIII are products of stemmatic analysis — in the case of Book VIII, a
^ The term is Joseph Bedier's. In 1895 Bedier had first published an edition of the Lai de L'Ombre edited according to Lachmannian genealogical procedures. Criticized by Gaston Paris (Bedier's own teacher) for its steminata, the edition was revised and republished in 1913, with a lengthy preface attacking Lachmannian stemmatic analysis, particularly its tendency to produce two-part (bifid) stemmata. Two later articles published in 1928 set forth his "best text" theory draw on his experience in the two earlier editions, especially as criticized by Paris; see "La tradition manuscrite du Lai de L'Ombre: reflexions sur I'art d'editer les anciens textes," Romania 54 (1928): 161-196, 321—356; rpt. as pamphlet, 1970. And see Mary Speer, "Old French Literature," Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. D. C. Greetham (New York: MLA, 1995).
Edelen corrects the text of 1593 in fifty-eight substantives and thirty-two nonsub- stantives; in addition, he corrects forty miscitations. Nine substantive corrections and four improvements of punctuation come from two contemporary copies in which manuscript corrections were made: the WoUey copy, in the Pforzheimer Collection (now at the Uxiiversity of Texas, Austin), and Richard Bancroft's copy, in Lambeth Palace Library. See Folger Library Edition, 1 : xxxi.
^ See "The Calculus of Error, or Confessions of a General Editor," Modem Phi- lology 75 (1978): 247-260.
14 W. SPEED HILL
stemma of some complexity.^ Laetitia Yeandle's texts of the Tractates and Sermons divide between best-text editions of works that survive only in printed exemplars and stemmatic texts of those that survive in multiple manu- script copies. In addition, volumes 3-5 reprint as documents a variety of manu- scripts, some newly discovered, such as a set of Autograph Notes relating to the composition of Book VIII, as well as ancillary texts first printed by Keble. In the event, the Hooker Edition became an anthology of editorial methods and models available to the scholarly editor, 1967-1990.
As to "recent theoretical approaches," I would list four: (1) "versioning," where the attempt to conflate various witnesses into a single unified or unitary text is abandoned, and distinct versions, complete in themselves, are reprinted intact, as in the Oxford Shakespeare's printing of both Quarto and Folio Lears; (2) a socially based theory of text-production, articulated by Jerome J. McGann in his 1983 Critique of Modem Textual Criticism,^ although ten years later we have as yet no working prototype of a socially edited text;^ (3) le texte genetique, the editing of the full range of authorial drafts without privi- leging final or published forms of the text — editing texts as process, not prod- uct; and (4) the dismissal of all editions not photographic — especially so-called "critical" editions — as ipso facto firaudulent.^^
' That work survives in ten extant manuscripts and three early printed editions (1648, 1661, 1662). In order to plot them onto a stemma, one must assume the prior existence of six now nonextant manuscripts, or, alternatively, a missing manuscript that was copied and recopied six times before disappearing. See Folger Library Edition, 3: U- Ixxv, especially the stemma on p. Lx.
^ For an account of its impact, see D. C. Greetham, Foreward, A Critique of Modem Textual Criticism (rpt., Charlottesville and London: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1992). For a sample of current [as of 1992] discussion, see Fredson Bowers, "Unfin- ished Business," Text4 (1988): 1-11; Jerome J. McGann, "What is Critical Editing?" and T. H. Howard-HUl, "Theory and Praxis in the Social Approach to Editing" TEXT 5 (1991): 15-46 (and McGann, "A Response . . . ," ibid., 47-48); and G. Thomas Tanselle, "Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology," Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 83—143. McGann's influential Critique should be read in conjunction with his 1985 essay, "The Monks and the Giants: Textual and BibUographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works," in Jerome J. McGann, ed., Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 180-199.
^ Peter ShiUingsburg surveys the issues raised by McGann that confront a would- be "social contract editor" in his "Inquiry into the Social Status of Texts and Modes of Textual Criticism," Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 55-79.
'" In a variety of articles and lectures, Randall McLeod has demonstrated how per- vasive typographic distortion is in any modem letterpress edition. Accordingly, he himself uses only "photoquotes"— photocopied excerpts pasted in his essays — in lieu of typeset quotations, arguing that the best editor is no editor at all. See, for example.
Recent Theoretical Approaches 15
Of these four, two simply do not apply to Hooker. None of Hooker's works survives in forms so distinct as to constitute different versions.^' In- deed, no Renaissance author's drafts survive in a quantity sufficient to support genetic editing, although I beUeve the survival of Hooker's Autograph Notes, both for Book VIII and for his answer to the 1599 A Christian Letter, is unique for a writer of the period.'^ As for (4), if you think, with Random Cloud, that the best editor is no editor at all, you are not likely to be listening to this paper. In Hooker's case, two facsimiles of Books I— V (but none of Books VI— VIII) became available at the time our edition was going forward: Scolar Press (Menston, 1969) and The English Experience (Amsterdam/New York, 1971), and one of Two Sermons Upon Part of S. Judes Epistle (Amster- dam/New York, 1969). Their appeal to start-up graduate programs in EngUsh literature is manifest, but neither replaces Keble or, a fortiori, the Folger. That leaves us with McGann's social-contract theory. It originates, as Arthur Marotti has observed, in the "cultural materiahsm . . . impUcit in the interpre- tative practices of the New Historicism,"'^ as expressed in McGann's Critique and D. F. McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1985). But McGann's Critique should be read in conjunction with his 1985 essay, "The Monks and the Giants," where he argues (1) that in focusing textual criticism exclusively upon the production of editions. Bowers and Tanselle contributed to the schism between textual criticism and Uterary interpretation that afflicts
"Spellbound," in Play-Texts in Old Spelling: Papers from the Glendon Conference [1978], ed. G. B. Shand and Raymond C. Shady (New York: AMS, 1984), 81-96; "Un- amending Shakespeare's Sonnet 111," SEL 21 (1981): 75—96; "Tranceformations in the Text of Orlando Furioso," New Directions in Textual Studies, The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, 20.1-2 (1990): 61—85; and "Information on Informa- tion," r£XT5 (1991): 241-281. Cf. my review of the New Directions volume, TEXT 6 (1994): 370-381.
For a survey of various editorial models, their histories and their rationales, see my "English Renaissance: Nondramatic Literature," Scholarly Editing, 204-230, also available as "Editing Nondramatic Texts of the Renaissance: A Field Guide with Illustrations," the introductory essay in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993).
" A possible exception would be the tractate Cf Pride, where the published quarto of 1612 is one-third the length of the Dublin manuscript. However, where the two texts coincide the variants are not revisionary.
'2 See Folger Ubrary Edition (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977-1990), 3: 462-538 and 4: 1-81 passim, 83-97, and 101-167.
'■* "Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric," New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, 210.
16 W. SPEED HILL
the entire profession and (2) that, in adopting the methodology of classical and bibhcal textual scholarship to the very different conditions of editing "national scriptures," Bowers et al. unduly narrowed the field of view of textual criti- cism, which McGann defines as "a field of inquiry . . . incumbent upon any- one who works with and teaches literary products," but one "that does not meet its fate in the completion of a text of an edition of some particular work."'"*
The real secret of McGann's Critique and his subsequent essays is that he is not really interested in setting forth a codex-based replacement for copy-text editions. Rather, his energies are directed toward the creation and dissemina- tion of an electronically based hypermedia research archive of "The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti."'^ It is intended to occupy, uis-^-vis McGann's theorizing, what he asserts the Dekker Edition did for Fredson Bowers or what George Kane and Talbot Donaldson did for Piers Plowman: create that oxymoron: a revolutionary scholarly edition. The Oxford Byron did not exemplify McGann's Critique: it provoked it. The editorial es- tabhshment has taken McGann to task because he has not yet revealed what principle of textual selection would come into play if authorial intention is set aside as the privileged criterion of editorial judgment, but in his published essays McGann has remained outside the range of his critics' fire, concen- trating on the revolutionary impact of electronic "editing."
In the absence of specific guidance firom McGann — ^guidance repeatedly and authoritatively offered by Bowers and Tanselle for over a generation — one must infer what a socially determined edition of Richard Hooker might look Uke.*^
1. It would not privilege authorial manuscripts, as, for example, the Oxford Shakespeare does not when it bases its text of Hamlet on the Folio, not the Second Quarto, which has Shakespeare's autograph behind it. So,
''* "The Monks and the Giants"; see n.8, above. McGann continues: "A proper theory of textual criticism ought to make it clear that we may perform a comprehen- sive textual and bibliographical study of a work with different ends in view; as part of an editorial operation that will result in the production of an edition; as part of a critical operation for studying the character of that edition; as part of an interpretive operation for incorporating the meaning of the (past) work into a present context. No one of these practical operations is more fundamental than another, and all three de- pend for their existence on a prior scholarly discipline: textual criticism" (189).
^5 See Text 1 (1994): 95-105.
^^ An editor who is trying to put McGann's insights into practice is Gerald M. MacLean; see "What is a Restoration Poem? Editing a Discourse, Not an Author," Text 3 (1985): 319-346.
Recent Theoretical Approaches 17
much of Paul Stanwood's meticulous work on the textual history of the post- humous last three books and Laetitia Yeandle's on that of the Tractates and Ser- mons would inevitably recede in prominence. And I would have opted for the printed text of Book V, which circulated and was read in the seventeenth century as Pullen's scribal transcript was not, although, in my case, the result- ing text would not have been materially different from the one we printed.
2. It would attempt to retain the bibUographic codes of the early editions rather than resetting texts in modem typography, even one (Bembo) whose typeface is a modem interpretation of a Renaissance model, either by using photographic facsimiles, or type-facsimiles <J la Malone Society reprints. But if the former, they would be far less legible, substituting the bibUographic code for the Unguistic one; if the latter, prohibitively expensive.
3. Most problematically, it would not privilege or foreground Hooker himself; i.e., it would not be an "author-centered" edition. Thus equal space and place would be accorded Thomas Cartwright, Hooker's principal adversa- ry in the Lawes, and Walter Travers, Hooker's adversary at the Temple.^^ That would mean reprinting en bloc substantial portions of Cartwright's three works,'^ his Replye to Whitgift's Answere, Whitgift's Defense of the Aunswere against Cartwright's Replye, Cartwright's Second Replie to Whitgift, and Cart- wright's The Reste of the Second Replie, neither of which Whitgift himself an- swered. This, in turn, would necessitate reprinting the originary pamphlet in this controversy, the 1572 Admonition to the Parliament, to which Whitgift had addressed his Answere in 1573. This is exactly what Whitgift himself does in the Defense: first, a quote from the Admonition, then his response from the Answere, then an excerpt from Cartwright's Replye, capped by Whitgift's de- finitive determination, the Defense proper — four textual layers in all.^^
'^ Actually, Travers has, since 1612, been accorded a measure of equal bilUng with Hooker: his A Supplication made to the Priuy Counsel has traditionally been reprinted with The Answere of M\ Richard Hooker to a Supplication Preferred by M^ Walter Travers to the HH. Lords of the Privie Counsell. See W. Speed Hill, Richard Hooker: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Early Editions: 1593—1724 (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1970), items 10 and 6.
'^ William P. Haugaard, the commentary editor for the Preface and Books II-IV of the Lawes, analyzes Hooker's use of Cartwright, concluding that "Hooker cited 8.9% of the . . . Replye . . . 2.6% of . . . Seconde Replie and 4.5% of . . . The Reste of the Second Replie"; Folger Library Edition (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), 6: 150.
'^ The growth of the debate can be observed in the illustrations in vol. 6 of The Folger Library Edition, 384—392.
18 W. SPEED HILL
Whitgift's Tractatus 20, "Of the Authoritie of the Civill Magistrate in Eccles- iastical! matters" occupies pages 694—709. The entire topic occupies Book VIII of Hooker's Lawes, on the royal supremacy. Substantially all of the Admonition and Whitgift's Answere are reprinted in Whitgift's Defense. My own copy of Whitgift is a folio of 823 pages. STC lists two editions. I cannot believe that the Elizabethan equivalent of the NEH did not subvene the ex- pense of composing, printing, and reprinting this volume, with its complex multi-layered typography, black-letter, italic, and roman, and its concomitant changes in font size. Likewise, I cannot believe that the North American equivalent of Lambeth Palace, the NEH, would subvene its reprinting today, as the Parker Society did in the 1850s.^^
Nor would it be sufficient simply to reprint the immediately preceding controversy: we ought to include Richard Bancroft's two (anonymous) quartos, Daungerous positions and proceedings, published and practised within this Hand of Brytaine, under pretence of Reformation, and for the Presbiteriall Discipline and A Suruay of the pretended holy discipline. Contayning the beginninges, successe, parts, proceedings, authority, and doctrine of it: with some of the manifold, and materiall repugnances, variety, and vncertaineties, in that behalfe. Faithfully gathered, by way of historicall narration, out of the bookes and writings, of principall fauourers of that platforme Anno 1593. To which we should add: John Bridges's A Defence of the Gouemment Established in the Church of Englande for Ealesiasticall Matters. Contayning an aunswere unto a Treatise called. The Learned Discourse of Eccl. Government, otherwise intituled, A briefe and plaine declaration concerning the desires of all thefaithfull Ministers, that have, and do seekefor the discipline and reformation of the Church of Englande. Comprehending likewise an aunswere to the arguments in a Treatise named The judgement of a most Reverend and Learned man from beyond the seas, etc. Aunswering also to the argumentes ofCalvine, Beza, and Danaeus, with other our Reverend learned Brethren, besides Caenalis and Bodinus, both for the regiment of women, and in defence of her Majestie, and of all other Christian Princes supreme Government in Ealesiastical causes. Against The Tetrarchie that our Brethren would erect in every particular congregation, of Doctors, Pastors, Governors and Deacons, with their severall and joynt authoritie in Elections, Excommunications, Synodall Constitutions and other Ealesiasticall matters. Aunswered by John Bridges Dean of Sarum.^^ (Bridges' quarto is as long as his title: 1396 pages). To con- tinue to Ust the relevant tides that make up this particular "discourse" would
^° John Whitgift, Works, ed. John Ayre, Parker Society Edition, 46-48 (Cam- bridge, 1851-1853).
^' Bancroft's works are STC 1344 and 1352; Bridges' is 3734; he is replying to William Fulke (STC 10395) and Hadrian Saravia (STC 2021).
Recent Theoretical Approaches 19
only induce hypnosis. Other, younger and more energetic, more politically astute scholars may see gold where I see dross; perhaps we have the making of yet another Garland Archive here. To be sure, by burying excerpts of Bridges, Bancroft, Whitgift, Cosin, Bilson, Sutcliffe, Saravia, Fulke, Cart- wright, Travers, Jewel, et al. in our (still quite full) annotations, we subordi- nate them to Hooker, but that, after all, has been the verdict of history, which has kept Hooker in print for most of the four hundred years since 1593, while allowing his confreres and antagonists to gather dust on rare-book shelves.^ The pohtically correct will say: "but the established Church suppressed The Admonition, the Second Admonition, and the first edition of Cartwright's Re- plye — the formal censorship of books in Elizabethan England being delegated to the Bishop of London. By centering your edition on Hooker, you are simply recapitulating that original suppression and so compounding an earUer injustice." All true. But if you want the Folger's name on your edition, if you want the NEH to pay its editorial and pubUcation costs, if you want Harvard University Press to pubUsh it, you do not interrogate history's verdict too vigorously. From Henry Hallam in 1827, who described Hooker as a knight of romance among the vulgar brawlers of religious controversy,^ to H. R. Trevor-Roper in 1977,^"* not to speak of the celebratory prose of my contri- buting editors. Hooker's Lawes has historically been accorded an exceptional status, being admitted to the canon of EngHsh literature, as it was at Harvard a generation ago, as a literary work, not a mere historical document.^
^^ Cartwright's Replye went into an immediate second edition, doubdess because the first was ordered suppressed, but apart from its incorporation in the Parker Society's edition of Whitgift's Defense (equivalent to his Works), it has never been reprinted since 1574.
^ The Constitutional History of England from the Accession of Henry VTI to the Death of George II, 5th ed. (London, 1846), 1: 214, first published in 1827.
^■* Speaking at the publication of volumes 1 and 2 of the Edition, Trevor^Roper remarked on Hooker's "Olympian" reputation, seeming to stand so "benignly above the batde in which, historically, he had been so deeply engaged" (103), and concluded by quoting Lord Acton, testimony that "in the sixteenth century ... as a serious quest for a set of principles which should hold good alike under all changes of religion, 'Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity stands almost alone.' " See "Richard Hooker and the Church of England," Renaissance Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), first printed in the New York Review of Books, 24 November 1977.
^^ For example, the Pforzheimer Collection, English Literature 1475-1640, has five Hooker items (498-502) but no other works of EHzabethan religious controversy. Of the Lawes of Ecdesiasticall Politic was included in the exhibition. Printing and the Mind of Man (London and New York, 1967) — i.e., as one of the hundred most important books of the modem West. Citing a 1930 Cornell dissertation by Lewis Freed, "The Sources of Johnson's Dictionary," Alvin Keman notes that, after Locke, Hooker was
20 W. SPEED HILL
In retrospect, it is clear to me that a scholarly edition is not as exempt from the contingencies of the time and place in which it is undertaken as earlier I had naively assumed, and I am quite sure that an edition of Hooker's Works could not be mounted on the scale of the Folger Library Edition were it to be inaugurated today. The auspices were unusually favorable twenty-five years ago; they seem distinctly less so today. ^^ The authority of the author- centered critical edition as a scholarly ideal has all but disappeared, at least among textualists.^^ The literary canon into which Hooker was atypically in- serted is itself being reconstituted. "Literature" in the traditional sense is sus- pect,^^ and both "timeless beauty" and "the tranquil beauty of the old phi- losophy" are being remaindered. But, if you deny Hooker his exceptionaHsm, you undercut as well the profession's support for the editing of his works, and
the second most quoted author in the first volume of the Dictionary, with 1,212 citations; Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 196, first pubUshed in 1987 as Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson. And excerpts from the Lawes still grace the two standard anthologies in the field, Norton and Oxford; The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2 vols., 6th ed., M. H. Abrams, gen. ed. (New York, 1993), 1: 1013-1020, and The Oxford Anthology of Eng- lish Literature, 2 vols., ed. Frank Kermode and John Hollander (New York, 1973), 1: 1424—1429. Most telling of all, both the New and the "Old" Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature accord Hooker a section to himself (§4. VI), thus ranking him with Chaucer (§2.111), Milton (§2.VI), and Shakespeare (§3.IX), the only other authors so singled out.
On the distinction between "text" and "work," see G. Thomas Tanselle, A Ra- tionale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), and Margreta de Grazia, "What is a Work? What is a Document," New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, 199-207.
^^ See "Editing Richard Hooker: A Retrospective," Sewanee Theological Review 36.2 (Easter 1993): 187-199.
^^ See my review o{ New Directions in Textual Studies (1989), The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, 20.1-2 (1990), in TEXT 6 (1994): 370-382, as well as that of D. C. Greetham, "Enlarging the Text," in Review 14 (1992): 1-33. See also my review of Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), for Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, 12 (1996 for 1994): 261-276. See also, inter alia, Derek Pearsall, "Revision and Revisionism in Middle Enghsh Editing," forthcoming, TEXT 7 (1994): 107-126; and Stephen Orgel, "Prospero's Wife," Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 219- 220. Orgel was a speaker at the 1988 Toronto Conference on Editorial Problems, aptly entided, "Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance," which canvassed just such topics (ed. Randall McLeod [New York: AMS, 1994]).
2^ See Alvin Keman, The Death of Literature (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990).
Recent Theoretical Approaches 21
you are truly left with a "University Carrier's" choice: an edition erected on what are rapidly becoming obsolete textual assumptions, an edition erected on more current ideological assumptions but prohibitively expensive to produce and stupifyingly dull to read, or no edition at all. I take my stand by the first of these alternatives.
Robert Burton's Sources
and Late Topical Revision in
The Anatomy of Melancholy
THOMAS C. FAULKNER
NOW THAT THE THIRD AND FINAL VOLUME OF THE TEXT OF Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy is complete, with the two commentary volumes due to follow in about two years, it is appropriate to discuss two of the ways the new Clarendon Edition will open up new approaches to the Anatomy. The first of these is the record of the growth of the Anatomy provided by the textual apparatus, and the second is the accurate identification of many of Burton's sources for the first time.
Apart firom the correction of compositor's errors, and the major contri- bution of the forthcoming commentary, the greatest assistance the Clarendon Edition of the Anatomy will provide to Burton scholarship is the identification of the editions in which the thousands of added passages originate. This per- mits the tracking of Burton's reading and the development of his ideas during the course of the six editions, through which the work expanded fi-om 353,369 words in 1621 to 516,384 words in 1651. Scholars have long been interested in analyzing Burton's progressive development of various topics through the growing Anatomy. Lawrence Babb devoted a chapter of Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (East Lansing, 1959) to an analysis of the growth of six passages. EarUer J. Max Patrick wrote about the development of Burton's concept of the ideal commonwealth in "Robert Burton's Utopianism" {PQ 27, 1948). And Robert M. Browne has traced the evolution of Burton's cosmology in "Robert Burton and the New
24 THOMAS C. FAULKNER
Cosmology" (MLQ 13, 1952). However, all previous efforts to discuss the growth of the Anatomy have been limited to specific sections because there has never been a complete collation of all six editions. Dennis G. Donovan undertook a collation of "ReHgious Melancholy" for his 1965 University of Illinois dissertation, but his analysis consists principally of lists of authors added in each edition.
"Religious Melancholy" provides good examples of Burton's revisions made in response to the changing political and religious climate of the 1630s. What is most significant about Burton's additions to this section in 1632 and 1638 is the sharpening of his attacks on non-Christian religions, Catholicism, and the English Puritans. In other words, he strengthens the case for the Church of England in the midst of increasing pressure firom the noncon- formists that culminated in the Civil Wars that began the year after Burton's death. Of course. Burton's anti-Catholicism pervades the Anatomy and was consistent throughout his life, but in "Religious Melancholy" he reinforces the identification of Catholicism with paganism — a thesis central to the reformers' criticism of the Catholic church. With consummate irony he introduces in 1638 Jose de Acosta's account of the pagan practices at the time of the conquest of the Americas in Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Seville, 1590), translated by Edward Grimstone as The Naturall and Morall Historic of the East and West Indies (London, 1604):
what strange Sacraments, like ours of Baptisme and the Lords Supper, what goodly Temples, Priests, sacrifices they had in America when the Spaniards first landed there, let Acosta the Jesuite relate lib. 5. cap. 1, 2, 3, 4, &c. and how the Divel imitated the Arke, and the children of Israels comming out of Egypt; with many such. (3.345: 5—9. All ref- erences are to volume, page, and line numbers in the Clarendon Edition)
In 1632 he quoted the following passage firom Sir Edward Sandys, A Rela- tion of the State of Religion, originally published in 1605, but reissued in 1629: "The worst Christians of Italy are the Romans, of the Romans the Priests are leudest, the leudest priests are preferred to he Cardinalls, & the haddest man amongst the Cardinalls is chosen to be Pope" (3.351: 12-14). A page later Burton added the following quotation fi:om John Speed's The Theater of the Empire of Great Britain (the publication of a new edition in 1631 may have brought Speed back to Burton's notice):
We have had in England, as Armachanus demonstrates, above thirty thousand Friers at once; & as Speed collects out of Lelande and others, almost 600 religious houses, and neere two hundred thousand pound in revenewes of the old rent, belonging to them, besides Images of
Robert Burton's Sources 25
Gold, Silver, plate, furniture, goods and ornaments, as Weever calcu- lates and esteems them at the dissolution of Abbies, worth a million of gold. (3.352: 18-24)
Other late additions to Burton's polemic include references to and quotations from Tommaso Campanella, Atheismus triumphatus, sive reductio ad religionem per scientiarum ueritates (Rome, 1631) against atheists; Jacobus Boissardus, De Diui- natione & Magicis Praestigiis (1616) against paganism; and Theodorus Biblian- der's treatise on the Alcoran appended to his edition of a twelfth-century Latin translation.
An excellent example of how the Anatomy deals with contemporary events is Burton's treatment of the Sabbatarian controversy. This long-standing con- troversy between Puritans and AngHcans over the observance of Sunday had caused James I to issue in 1618 a declaration authorizing rural sports following divine service. This declaration, known as the Book of Sports, was reissued by Charles 1 on October 18, 1633, in response to increasing Puritan attempts to put down Sunday rural sports. In the declaration, the King specifically author- izes Sunday afternoon recreations that various Puritan local authorities had banned:
Our pleasure likewise is, that the bishop of that diocesse [Chester] take the Uke straight order with all the Puritans, and Precisians within the same, either constraining them to conforme themselves, or to leave the countrey according to the laws of our kingdome and canons of our church, and so to strike equally on both hands against the con- temners of our authority and adversaries of our church. And as for our good people's lawfiill recreation, our pleasure Ukewise is, that, after the end of divine service, our good people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawfiill recreation, such as dauncing, either men or women, archerie for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmlesse recreations, nor from having of May-games, Whitsun ales, and Morris-dances, and the setting up of May-poles, and other sports therewith used, so as the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine service; and that women shall have leave to carry rushes to the church for the decoring of it, according to their old custome. But withall we doe here accompt still as prohibited all unlawfijll games to be used upon Sundays only, as beare and bull baitings, interludes, and at all times in the meaner sort of people, by law prohibited, bowUng. {Somers Tracts, 2: 55)
As the Book of Sports was ordered to be read in all churches. Burton would have first read it in 1618 at St. Thomas's in Oxford where he had been vicar since November 1616 when he was presented by the Dean and Chapter of
26 THOMAS C. FAULKNER
Christ Church. When it was reissued by Charles I in 1633, Burton would have again read it at St. Thomas's and would have seen to it that his curate, John Mallinson, read the declaration in his living of Seagrave in Leicestershire, which he held from 15 June 1632.
Burton first dealt with the Sabbatarian controversy in the "Exercise Rec- tified" subsection of the 1621 edition of the Anatomy. Here in the context of recommending healthy exercise as a remedy for melancholy, he attacks the Puritan attempts to prohibit rural sports and entertainments on Sunday:
Dancing, Singing, Masking, Mumming, Stage-plaies, howsoever they bee heavily censured by some severe Catoes, yet if opportunely & soberly used, may justly be approved. Melius est fodere, quhm saltare, saith Austin, but what is that if they delight in it? Nemo saltat sobrius, But in what kinde of dance? I knowe these sports have many oppugners, whole Volumes writ against them; and some againe, because they are now cold and wayward, past themselves, cavell at all such youthfull sports in others, as he did in the Comedy, they thinke them, HUco nasci senes &c. [Terence, Heautontimorumenos 213] Some out of preposterous zeale object many times triviall arguments, and because of some abuse, will quite take away the good use, as if they should forbid wine, because it makes men drunk; but in my judgement they are too Sterne: there is a time for all things, for my part, I will subscribe to the Kings Declaration, and was ever of that mind, those May-games, wakes, & Whitson-ales, &c. if they be not at unseasonable houres, may justly be permitted. (2.82: 1-17)
In 1628 Burton added the next sentence: "Let them fireely feast, sing & dance, have their poppet playes, hobby-horses, tabers, croudes, bag-pipes &c. play at ball, and barley-breakes, & what sports and recreations they like best" (2.82: 17-19).
Burton's additions to "Religious Melancholy" in the 1638 edition of the Anatomy reflect the recent intensification of the Sabbatarian controversy. In the "Symptomes of Religious Melancholy" subsection, he specifically added "hawking, hunting, &c." (3.387: 9-10) as examples of "honest recreations" prohibited by the Puritans. A few pages later he added "hauking, hunting, singing, dancing" to the enumeration of "many good and lawfull things, hon- est disports, pleasures and recreations" created by God "for our use" (3.391: 9—10). And a few lines later he adds this passage:
So that he that will not rejoyce and enjoy himselfe, making good use of such things as are lawfully permitted, non est temperatus, as he will, sed superstitiosus. There is nothing better for a man, than that hee should eat and drinke, and that hee should make his Soule enjoy good in his labour,
Robert Burton's Sources 27
Ecdes. 2. 24. And as one said of hauking and hunting, tot solatia in hac cegri orbis calamitate mortalibus tcediis Dens objecit, I say of all honest rec- reations, God hath therefore indulged them to refresh, ease, solace and comfort us. (3.391: 15-22)
A few lines below, Burton adds "honest sports, games, and pleasant recrea- tions" as examples of "many good gifts" which Puritans seek to deprive the people of because they "tyrannize over our brothers soules" (3.391: 27-28). Finally, at the bottom of page 391, Burton recounts a scurrilous thirteenth- century anecdote from Sebastian Munster about a Jew who fell into a privy on the sabbath and was unable to be rescued on Saturday because of Jewish Sabbatarianism or on Sunday because of Christian Sabbatarianism. Unfortu- nately the man died before Monday. Clearly Burton was not aiming primarily at thirteenth-century Jews or Christians, but at seventeenth-century Sabbatar- ians, as he makes clear by observing that "Wee have myriads of examples in this kind" and adding in 1632 "amongst those rigid Sabbatarians."
He was still concerned with the Sabbatarian controversy when he last re- vised "Exercise Rectified" for the posthumous 1651 edition. He expanded the quotation from Ecclesiastes, adding, "a time to moume, a time to dance. Eales. 3. 4. a time to embrace, a time not to embrace, (vers. 5) and nothing better then that a man should rejoyce in his oum works, vers. 22" (2.82: 12-14). Thus in these late additions to "ReUgious Melancholy" and "Exercise Rectified," Burton up- holds the Laudian Erastianism of the Book of Sports and castigates the Puritans for their Sabbatarianism.
Perhaps the most persistent editorial problem in editing The Anatomy of Melancholy is accurate identification of Burton's citations and quotations. The large number of such references is, of course, a major part of the problem. We have 2,419 entries in our indexes of historical persons, the majority of whom are authors cited or quoted by Burton.
The frequendy stated opinion that Burton is inaccurate and careless in his quotations and references often proves to be unfounded when Burton's speci- fic source for a given quotation is discovered. From the start of the Clarendon Edition, Burton's own Ubrary has been of considerable assistance in estab- lishing the source of quotations and citations for about half of his authorities. My colleague Nicolas Kiessling, in The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford Bib- liographical Society, 1988), has catalogued 1,738 books Burton once owned, of which all but 210 are in the Bodleian or Christ Church Ubraries. However, there is no record that Burton owned the works of some of his most fre- quently quoted authors (Ariosto, Aristode, Amobius, Augustine, Timothy Bright, Jerome Cardan, Joannes Heumius, Horace, Joaimes Baptista Mon- tanus, Plato, and Victorius TrincaveUius, for example); he often quoted from
28 THOMAS C. FAULKNER
editions other than those he owned; his citations for Greek works typically are to Latin versions, and his references to and quotations from the works of various authors are frequently from what we today call "through references" — anthologies hke Erasmus's Adagia.
A good example of his use of anthologies, from the subsection "Cure of Love Melancholy," is found on page 245 of the third volume. Here in a cata- logue of unrequited love, Burton quotes from several eclogues, but cites only "Erasmus Egl. Galatea" in note d at line 21. However, only lines 26—27 were found in the eclogue Galatea in the 1540 edition of Erasmus's Omnia Opera published in Basel by Froben. "Despectus tibi sum, " in line 24 is from Virgil, Eel. 2.19. The source of lines 20-23 was ultimately found in an anthology of pastoral verse in the Bodleian that was part of Burton's library. The item, Kiessling 242, is entided Bucolicorum autores XXXVIII. Quotquot videlicet a Ver- gilii aetate ad nostra usque tempora . . . (Basel, 1546). Here the Une "Cautibus Ismariis immotior," which Burton paraphrases as "hard as flint," is found in another version of the eclogue entided "Pamphilus sive Eros," and here too we have located sources for Burton's quotations from other pastorals, for example, Mantuan's first eclogue "Faustus" — ^the eclogue most frequently quoted in the Anatomy.
Another difiicult problem is the references Burton makes to works that are complementary or explanatory to other works from which he is directly quot- ing. When such references are garbled, they can be extremely difficult to identify. An example may be seen in a passage on pages 369—370 from the third volume. Burton here cites a list of rational objections to the Christian religion and its sacraments compiled by Tommaso Campanella in his Atheismus Triumphatus (1631). Christianity, Campanella says, "is a most difficult dogma, subject to the blasphemies of heretics and the derision of politicians" who hold it impossible that "God is eaten as bread" and scofi"at the absurdity of the sacrament, arguing that "God is ridiculed by worms and flies when they pollute and devour him: he is subject to fire, water and robbers. They throw down the golden pix, yet this God does not defend himself How is he able to remain entire when the host is in so very many pieces, in the sky, on the earth, etc." At the beginning of this last passage, added in 1638, as were all of the references to Campanella's Atheismus Triumphatus, Burton has a marginal note "Lege Hossman: Mus exenteratus" (370: v). After a long and futile search for the reference in works by Hossman (Abraham Hossmanus) or Daniel Hofiman, the correct source of the citation was finally located in Rodolphus Hospinianus's Historia sacramentaria (1598—1602). Hospinian, a Swiss Protestant theologian, takes aim at the ritualistic absurdities of the Catholic sacraments. Burton's citation refers to Hospinian's explanation of the problem of what is to be done if a mouse eats the consecrated host. The answer is, if you can
Robert Burton's Sources 29
catch the mouse, you kill it, disembowel it (Mus exenteratus), rescue any bits of the bread that have survived, bum the mouse, bowels, and bread, and lay the ashes reverendy on the altar.
Burton's intention is clear: the ritualistic and pagan absurdities of CathoUcs are just as ridiculous as the skeptical criticism of the sacraments made by atheists. Or, in Burton's words: "But he that shall read the Turks Alcoran, the Jewes Talmud, and Papists Golden Legend, in the meane time will sweare that such grosse fictions, fables, vaine traditions, prodigious paradoxes and cere- monies, could never proceed fi-om any other spirit, then that of the divell himselfe, which is the Author of confusion and lies" (370: 6-10).
A third example of a troublesome source problem is found in the quota- tion fi-om Marinus Marsennus found in the second volume on page 53 at note e. Referring to those who complain of "modeme Divines" (presumably Scho- lastic theologians and apologists for the Counter-Reformation, but probably also skeptical Anglicans like Burton himself) who "are too severe and rigid against Mathematitians; ignorant and peevish, in not admitting their true dem- onstrations and certaine observations, that they tyrannize over arte, science, and all philosophy, in suppressing their labours, . . . forbidding them to write, to speake a truth, all to maintaine their superstition, and for their profits sake," Burton quotes firom Marsennus's Quaestiones Celeberrimae in Genesim (Paris, 1623): "Now they persuade theologians to remain in the greatest ignorance, to be unwilling to accept true knowledge, and to exert tyranny, so that they can keep them in false dogmas, superstitions and the Catholic religion." How- ever, this passage is only found in some copies, the leaf having been canceled apparently to avoid attracting the attention of the Inquisition. The cancellan- dum (Sig. e) is present in the Bodleian copy, but the Christ Church copy has the cancallans.
These three example of problems in locating accurate sources of Burton's citations and quotations in the Anatomy provide an insight into why it has taken Rhonda Blair, Nicolas Kiessling and me over a decade to complete work on the text and why John Bamborough required another three years to ready the commentary for pubUcation.
On Representing Tyndale's English
ANNE RICHARDSON
I DELIVERED A DRAFT OF THIS PAPER AT THE 1993 SESSION OF THE Modem Language Association — on the eve of William Tyndale's 500th year, when his reputation had vaulted into a triumphal phase. A scholar not given to exaggeration had said of the heresiarch that he "wrote Uke an angel; no EngUsh writer has had such influence while remaining so unrecognized."^ In allusion to Tyndale's biblical translations, a bold epigram made the rounds: "What WiUiam Shakespeare did for EngUsh poetry, WilHam Tyndale did for EngUsh prose. "^ The year 1994 saw two new books on Tyndale,^ two international conferences, and well-attended exhibits, notably at the British Library and the Tyndale Museum at Vilvoorde, Belgium. Memorial services were held in churches throughout the EngUsh-speaking world (including Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Capetown), in which readings from the Bible were in Tyndale's versions. An international Tyndale Society was founded, charged with sponsoring two journals, one a fresh forum for members' ideas, the other a scholarly annual.
' Excerpt from a review by M. A. Screech in the London Times, quoted in an undated flyer issued in October 1992 by Yale University Press, London.
^ It was printed in modified form in the Newsletter of the WilHam Tyndale Quin- centenary Committee in October 1992.
^ David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), and William Tyndale and the Law, ed. John A. R. Dick and Anne Richardson, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 25 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994).
32 ANNE RICHARDSON
For all that, there is still no consensus on Tyndale; at least, nothing that has hardened into dogma. John Fines regards Tyndale as the sole, indispensa- ble force behind the English Reformation.'* Richard Marius denies him that supreme causality, but proposes 1525, the year in which Tyndale succeeded in printing the first firagment of his New Testament, as the beginning of the modem era.^ Certainly to an unquiet England Tyndale gave powerful thought, including a nascent formulation of the prescriptive human rights that serve as touchstones of civil behavior in our time.^
He was congenial with our concerns in other ways. By comparison with most of his contemporaries, he was a pacifist;^ by comparison, a feminist;^ and again by comparison, an advocate for religious toleration in a world engorged with odium theologicum and its violent subaltern, antisemitism.^ These modernities no less than his theological allegiances swept Tyndale to the stake. It is astonishing that a person who led such a menaced Hfe could write with joyous tenderness. The following translation of the Song of Solo-
* Biographical Register of Early English Protestants: 1525-1558, 2 vols. (London, 1980-1987), unpaginated.
^ Thomas More: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1984), 311.
^ See Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Fifth Amendment: The Right against Self-in- crimination, 2nd ed. (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1986): 62-64; and Anne Rich- ardson, "William Tyndale and the Bill of Rights," William Tyndale and the Law, 1 1- 29.
' He was an Erasmian pacifist well past the 1526 Siege of Mohacs, an event which moved Erasmus himself, in De bello turcica, to compromise his own pacifism by admitting the notion of a just war. Tyndale later modified his own views on war and physical violence. See An Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue . . . , ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press for the Parker Society, 1850), 188; and Exposi- tions and Notes on Sundry Portions of the Holy Scriptures, together with The Practice of Prelates, ed. Henry Walter (ibid., 1849), 63, 67.
^ If a reasonable criterion for male feminism is a man's toleration or advocacy of women's performance in traditionally male roles, Tyndale (anachronistically) fits the bill. In his controversy with More over ordination, Tyndale (with certain exceptions) follows Paul's prohibition of women preachers, but infiiriates More by pronouncing women qualified to perform the sacraments and considers "widow," for a woman of 60 or older, as an office of the church {An Answer, 18, 29-30, 98, 176).
^ The only wholehearted advocate for the rights of Jews in Tyndale's Europe was Johannes ReuchHn (1455-1522). Tyndale less passionately beHeved that Jews had the natural law right to Uve in peace. He denounced the violence of his fellow Christians: "We be taught even of very babes / to kyll a turke / to slee a Jewe / to burne an heretike ..." {The Obedience of a Christian Man, STC 24446 [Antwerp: Johan Hooch- straten, 1528], sig. C7v/7-9). Subsequent citations from the Obedience will give signa- ture and hne numbers, as here.
Representing Tyndale's English 33
mon 2, shaped for presentation as a litui^cal epistle, accompanied Tyndale's 1534 revised New Testament:
I am the floure of the felde, and lylyes of the valeyes. As the lylye amonge the thomes, so is my loue amonge the daughters. As the ap- pletre amonge the trees of the wood so is my beloued amonge the sonnes: in his shadow was my desyer to syt, for his frute was swete to my mouth. He brought me into his wyne seller: and his behauer to mewarde was louely. Beholde my beloued sayde to me: vp and hast my loue, my doue, my bewtifiill and come, for now is wynter gone and rayne departed and past. The floures apere in our contre and the tyme is come to cut the vynes. The voyce of the turtle doue is harde in oure lande. The fygge tre hath brought forth her fygges, and the vyne blossoms geue a sauoure. Vp hast my loue, my doue, in the holes of the rocke and secret places of the walles. Shew me thy face and let me here thy voyce, for thy voyce is swete and thy fassyon bewtifiill.'"
Such loveliness is the best argument for representing Tyndale's English in our national university curriculum. In particular, to experiment with Tyndale's "ravishing solo"'' as the base text replacing the various bibles-by-committee for a course in the Bible as Uterature might free up good energies. We are unaccustomed to humor, to sprightliness in our experience of Holy Writ. The history of English Christianity might have developed quite differendy, had Tyndale mediated its sacred book.
We proceed to the comic crux of Gen. 3:1-4, in which the serpent clears his throat and accosts Eve in the masculine honorific as "syr."
Ah syr, that God hath sayd, ye shal not eate of all maner trees in the garden. And the woman sayd vnto the serpent, of the fiiite of the trees in the garden we may eate, but of the fiiite that is in the middes of the garden (sayd God) se that ye eat not, and se that ye touch it
'® Tyndale included in an appendix to his 1534 New Testament this and other Old Testament passages adaptable to liturgical use. I quote this passage in its original spelling from The New Testament translated by William Tyndale (1534) . . . with . . . the variants of the edition of 1525 f-1526], ed. N. Hardy Wallis (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1938), 580. This and other Old Testament liturgical episdes are also available with modernized accidentals in Tyndale's New Testament translated from the Greek by William Tyndale in 1534, ed. David DanieU (London and New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989).
" David Daniell, Tyndale's New Testament, vii.
34 ANNE RICHARDSON
not: lest ye dye. Then sayd the serpent vnto the woman: tush ye shall not dye.^^
Can Tyndale be telling us that the prelapsarian Satan has not yet got the cosmos figured out? He sees that this pair of creatures are diflferent from him- self (and most unwelcome), but fails to note that they are different from each other!
The crux Ues in the likeUhood that Tyndale, elated by the comic possi- bihties of this scene, threw to the winds the Erasmian ideas of going ad forties to the Hebrew, and his own excellence in the trilinguum, and with "Ah syr" playfiilly improvised. According to Gerald Hammond, the original Hebrew expression which "Ah syr" is meant to translate, af ki (in informal notation), is unique here in the Old Testament. It has the force of an incredulous query: "Did God really say . . . ?"'^ — or as John Rogers, editor of the 1537 "Matthew" Bible (STC 2066) re-Hebraized the verse: "Ye, hath God sayd in dede . . . ?" Attempts to integrate this ironical "indeed" by interpreting "syr" as "sure" or "surely" are defeated by the absence of any lexicographic record of such use.^"* The housewifely "apums" that the deUnquent couple sew for themselves at the end of the episode provide another comic touch. No refer- ence book I have consulted on aprons says that they cover more than the front of the body.
I close this argument for Tyndale's inclusion in the canon by reporting a colleague's repeated use of the great exordium ("WiUiam Tyndale other wise called WiUiam Hychins vnto the Reader") of The Obedience of a Christian Man as an introductory assignment in her course in sixteenth-century English Ut- erature. Her classes were increasingly made up of people from countries in which human rights were routinely violated. There was no Tyndalian theme, from censorship to martyrdom, that left them uncomprehending or unmoved. Many voted this first assignment their favorite reading of the year.
Is it necessary to defend modernizing of accidentals? This is needed by the
'^ William Tyndale, Thefirste boke of Moses, rev. ed., STC 2351 (Antwerp: M. de Keyser, 1534), sig. B2v. Tyndale's translation of Genesis first appeared with the whole of the Pentateuch in 1530 (STC 2350).
^■^ Gerald Hammond, letter to the author, 8 December 1993. J. H. Hertz, in The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, five vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1929), 1:25, trans- lates, "Is it really so, that God (Elohim) hath said?"
'^ Hammond's point; also see David Daniell, William Tyndale, 407 nn. 1—3. Ham- mond further suggests consulting the OED for sirrah: it is "first recorded in the 1520's; used playfully in addressing men or women; and, according to one authority, the suf- fixal part of it may be derived from the interjection, 'ah!' So, is it possible that 'Ah syr' = 'Sir ah?' "
Representing Tyndale's English 35
readership of literate generalists we would be foolish to patronize. I especially endorse David Daniell's poUcy, in his modem-spelling editions of Tyndale's scripture texts,'^ of honoring Tyndale's light punctuation, which we may ex- perience as underpunctuation. Tyndale, a fabled Unguist, often prefers rhythm and word order to punctuation marks. An analogy might be made to the ele- gant frugality of the water colorist who indicates white in an area by leaving the paper blank. By contrast, the only currently available source of Tyndale's polemical and other independent writings — the Parker Society edition of 1848-1850 — ^by overpunctuation direly misrepresents Tyndale's EngHsh for modem readers. The commas and semicolons are fiissy. Worse, the nonauth- orial exclamation points tum up the sound in a most unpleasant way. Tyndale, self-fashioned as a friend speaking to friends, is in such a presentation as ah- enating as a religious fanatic haranguing a crowd of the converted: Savonarola in a cold climate.
But all sound modernization must rest on an attempt at representation of what Tyndale actually wrote. My own store of such particulate matter derives not from the bibUcal translations but from work on a critical edition of The Obedience of a Christian Man, originally presented in 1976.^^ In such an enter- prise, it scarcely needs saying that one feels the pull of extremes between the authoritarian approach that rejects all elements of Tyndale's text not given entries in the Oxford English Dictionary or the Middle English Dictionary, and an antinomianism so casual as to grant mere printers' errors the status of words in Tyndale's text.
This customary editorial dilemma is sharpened by a triad of Tyndale-spe- cific conditions: our insufficient lexicographic control of the diction of Tyn- dale and his Early Tudor contemporaries; Tyndale's need, as a renegade EngHsh cleric, to entrust his writings to underground printers and their stafis; and the role in Tyndale's written language of the non-standard phonology of speech and writing in the Welsh border country of his birth.
Trusting lexicographic aids is a deUcate matter in the case of any of the early reformers — or of those with whom they locked horns. In the bibUogra- phical portion of the Supplement of the OED it is revealed that, gamely, the team of lexicographers compiled their findings from the original editions of all texts by Tyndale and by John Frith. But for Thomas More's spellings they
'^ Daniell's 1989 edition of Tyndale's 1534 New Testament edition was followed by Tyndale's Old Testament (London and New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), which contains the Pentateuch, Joshua through 2 Chronicles and Jonah. This is approxi- mately one-half of the Old Testament, translated by Tyndale before his arrest in 1535.
'^ "A Critical Edition of William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976.
36 ANNE RICHARDSON
used the normalized 1557 Works, published some twenty-two years after More's execution. And in the case of that amusing rascal, Dr. Robert Barnes, finally brought down in 1540 along with his protector Thomas Cromwell, all citations of his writings were taken firom the Daye— Foxe 1572 Whole Works of the Reformers, a landmark in systematic normaHzation. A search of the OED Supplement since delivery of this paper in 1993 reveals good selective cover- age of Tyndale's fellow-reformers.^^ But there is not the corroborative pool of actual forms and speUings in the epoch of 1525— 1550 that would enable a lexicographer to eye a dubious vocable and confidently pronounce it not a typo but a word.
For example, in the Obedience we find two uses of o for a: obove, onoynted. For the first, the OED has only obowen — traced to the north of England and time-centered in the fourteenth century. Moving to the MED, which is excellent company to Tyndalians in its documentation of the Lollard pres- ence— see the definition of to loll [someone] — we find both obove and onoynt. However, in accordance with the self-imposed guideUnes of the MED, we are not given a region of England or the time of a given word's entrance into the language before the cutofi^ of coverage in 1475. James L. Hamer recommends consulting the MED in tandem with Mcintosh's linguistic atlas,^^ which in its cartographic splendor of four foUo volumes has the potential of great precision in corroborating a Tyndale speUing. But Hamer remarks that the Atlas is difficult to use. Indeed, its size and weight impede frequent — and clearly essential — cross-references between the volumes. A source still in de- velopment for Tyndale's words and his antedatings to the 0£D's entries is the Michigan Early Modem EngUsh Materials (MEMEM).^^ The most exciting development in the way of firming our lexicographic grip on Tyndale's lan- guage is the decision to revise the OED for a third edition.^*^
*^ A sampling reveals that they read certain works by Bale, William Barlow, and .Fish. Alexander Alane's ("Alesius"') three English works, and whatever prefaces John Rogers wrote for his many editions of reform works, they excluded. They read Christopher St. German's two dialogues short-tided Doctor and Student in a 1638 edition which I suspect modernized the accidentals.
'^ James L. Hamer, Literary Research Guide: A Guide to Reference Sources for the Study of Literatures in English and Related Topics, 2nd ed. (New York: MLA, 1993), 211, #1860; Angus Mcintosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, comps., A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 4 vols. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1986).
'^ In 1993 Richard W. Bailey, who heads the project for an early modem EngUsh dictionary spanning 1475—1700, kindly searched MEMEM for me, for a sample of Tyndale's forms not recorded in the OED nor MED, but found no corroboration.
^° For a representative announcement and statement of purpose, see Scholars of Early Modem Studies 28 (Autumn 1994): 5.
Representing Tyndale's English 37
Tyndale's English need not nor cannot be explored through lexicography alone: the forces exerted by expatriation, persecution, and printing on the continent loom large. As a fugitive from the church's justice, Tyndale might have found himself forced to settle for ramshackle printing at cynically ele- vated prices. Instead, he achieved what looks to have been a tonic aUiance with Johan Hoochstraten of Antwerp (alias "Hans Luft" of "Marlborow in the lande of Hesse" and "Adam Anonymus [sic]" of Basel). ^^ As a member of what we call the "Marburg" group of books, printed by Hoochstraten for Tyndale and certain of his associates, the 1528 Obedience is neatly printed on high-quahty (i.e., durable) paper in "Schwabacher" (or "bastard" gothic), a graceftil and pleasantly legible typeface. The only appreciable cosmetic flaw is the wobbHness in the type of some of Tyndale's marginal glosses: the scabbards needed to lock these in place seem to have been in disrepair. The book con- tains a thirteen-item errata Ust drawn up by the press corrector (whose place Tyndale could have taken) .^
^* M. E. Kronenberg, "De Geheimzinnige Drukkers Adam Anonymus te Babel en Hans Luft te Marburg Ontmaskerd," Het Boek 8 (1919): 241-279; and "Notes on Engjish Printing in the Low Countries (Early Sixteenth Century)," The Library, 4th ser., 9 (1928-1929): 139-163. See also Anne Richardson, "The Evidence against an English First Edition of Tyndale's Obedience" Moreana 13, no. 52 (November 1976): 47-52.
Here I must introduce an eleventh-hour observation that may invalidate some of the assertions about Tyndale and typesetting that follow in the body of this essay. To the best of my knowledge, it is widely believed that an eariy modem compositor needed enough competence in the language of the text he was setting to syllabicate properly and to vary acceptable (how so determined?) spellings, in order to achieve flush-right line justification. It seems that Tyndale / Hoochstraten dispensed with all that. The compositor of the 1528 Obedience, Engjish-speaking or not, was evidendy authorized to break words summarily at the penultimate position in the line, blithely tack on a hyphen and complete the word firagment in the next line. One example out of hundreds will suffice: vufayne-dly (A2/6-7). Under this liberal rule, text could be set in type letter by letter, requiring of the compositor no knowledge of Eng^sh. The two other works printed by Hoochstraten and known to be by Tyndale — The Parable of the Wicked Mammon, STC 24454, and The Practice of Prelates, STC 24465— follow the same compositorial pattern. Time is not available to survey the methods followed by the other printers Tyndale engaged in his lifetime. The essential question posed by any such enquiry is, I think, whether a lenient and rather mechanical policy with respect to line justification resulted in more — or less — ^fidelity to the En^h Tyndale actually wrote.
^ Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 111. I am most grateful to Katharine F. Pantzer for her helpfiil advice at the onset of my work on this topic.
38 ANNE RICHARDSON
A grim challenge to Hoochstraten's work for Tyndale was Charles V's acti- vation of the state's punitive machinery against heresy. In 1528 there must have been discussion of the punishments (generally, various forms of maiming pour decourager des autres) for printers who collaborated with heretics, in what became Charles V's 1532 criminal code, the "Carolina. "^^ Perhaps, from Tyndale's point of view, Charles's afflictive sanctions actually had the benign effect of intimidating the less ethical printers and thus of bringing the best people to the fore. It would be good to know more about Hoochstraten and his kind.
A question posed by this collaboration and its products is the extent to which the printing process — the path of Tyndale's copy from its lodging in the visorium to its words on the page — altered what the 1528 Obedience said as written. Two hypotheses, neither of which has been advanced in print, are quick to assign responsibility to Hoochstraten's compositors for any strangeness in Tyndale's printed expressions. I believe this judgement premature. Courting feedback, I present the handful of spellings in the Obedience that I currently regard as authorial. They are noted in the OED and MED vestigially if at all. This category includes ubiquitous or very frequent expressions:
bedger (vb.) G5v/12, bedger (n.) K4v/1, bedgerdV\/2>, bedgers 18/25-26 and gloss, bedgett A3v/14, bedginge K5/19,2'^ bis(s)hap(p)(e)s A4/13, sherch B6/8, sherched B6/14,25 shercheth F7/13, sherchinge (adj.) F7/21, vnsherchable S4/ 10-11; this for thus L2/1; and wordly (adj.) A7/20, wordly (adv.) Gl/3 — this last form is, arguably, covered in the OED}^
There occur also orthographic patterns, such as e following a long vowel or diphthong:
^^ According to Jonathan Zophy in The Holy Roman Empire: A Dictionary Handbook (Westbrook, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 391, 492, the Constitutio criminalis Carolina was formulated in reaction to the Knights' War (1522—1523) and the Peasants' War (1524—1526). This early origin suggests that its bearings were known as early as 1528. J. F. Mozley, William Tyndale (London: SPCK, 1937), 124 n., refers to an edict of October 1531 in which underground printers "might be branded with a red hot iron, and lose an eye or a hand at the discretion of the judge."
^* But the OED records bedgarly (s.v. Beggarly).
^^ The MED uniquely records the preterit, sherched.
^^ Wordly is handled in the present OED far too obscurely, as a combination of word (a speUing of world contemporaneous with Tyndale) and suffix -ly. It naturally gets confused with the later coinage, "wordly wise," i.e., wise in verbal constructs only. Tyndale, however, uses wordly and worldly irrespective of that distinction.
Representing Tyndale's English 39
fayeth H8v/19, waeye D7v/18 gloss, wayet (for wait) E6/28 gloss, and yoeke F6v/7.
There is a pattern of employment of ea for short e:
previleage El/5 gloss, purchease Flv/16, reamedies S3/7 gloss, reaported I7v/17, and treaspase N7/19.
The following, too numerous to dismiss, seem to be instances of uvular and velar fricatives in ch, gh or h:
allehoryes R4v/30-31, belonheth D6v/27, encheritaunce G7v/8, enhlish C3v/30, exceadinghly 15/23, lonhe Nlv/16-17, strenghted P5v/21.
There is a sprinkling of coinages and portmanteau words that no general dic- tionary should be obliged to enter:
bis(s)hap(p)(e)s (see above), compolde (= compelled + polled) B7/23, disgresse (= degrade from orders, = disgrace, = "de-grease" by having palms symbolically scraped to remove anointing oil) Klv/21, divininite (= divinity + ninny) G8v/1, Knaveate (Lat. vb., pi. imp.; "Play the knave") Kl/25 gloss, misshapes (for bishops), PI /I, P2/1.
We conclude with isolated speUings that should be brought afresh to lexico- graphers' attention.
Ambasiasies V2v/7, Emperioure E6/ll,f any nge C5/14 ^oss, feeders (for feathers) F4v/6-7, gyrkyn (the incomplete MED will treat this form under entry-word yarken) I4v/28, gysse (for geese) C4/4, hoe (for how) K5v/9, hyeres (heirs) S6/13, imagion E5/20, kindes and kyndes (for kindness) E2v/31 and M2/31, labeureth H7/30, lawears Kl/24, leade (for laid) H8v/29, host (for lost) R4v/27 gloss, overser I7v/22, pharesay N2v/14, scapfre (immune to prosecution by adopting the tonsure, scap being a recorded spelling for scalpl) V5v/20, seaith N7/28, serves (pi., "offices") M3/4, stocke blynde {stocke for stark^ — OED first records Wycherley, 1675) Q2/31, strife S3v/27, the selfe (for thyself) D4v/28 gloss, vengaunce B3v/8, vsary L8/5-6, wayx 14/22, whorshepe H6/22.
The best orthographical corroboration for Tyndale's use of the forms pre- sented here is their appearance in his other works. If one lacks convenient access to their first editions, one can mine the lists of rejected forms very properly furnished by modem editors. N. Hardy Wallis, in his 1938 edition of Tyndale's 1534 New Testament with variants from the 1525-1526 edition, exemplifies Speed Hill's rule that a critical edition of a text will "[make] it
40 ANNE RICHARDSON
clear what is transmitted, what suppressed, in fiill detail ..." (emphasis mine).^^ Hardy Wallis's rejected "Misprints," 625-628, include bedgerly, hed- garly, least (for lest), this (for thus), lenght, strenght (involving fHcatives), and (in 1938, innocent of the M£D's display of the o/a phenomenon): olso, ond, another, opostle, wos (for was).
With these data before us, we confront the compositorial hypotheses.
The first of these, a woolly moonbeam, holds that the compositors whim- sically tampered with Tyndale's spellings in order to give them a Flemish timbre. Wytze Gs. Hellinga and Philip Gaskell invalidate that, citing the rule that a compositor who departed from copy had to make good his errors with- out pay.^^ The other hypothesis, far more plausible, explains the unusual spellings as the errors of compositors who knew too little English for their task. For this one must imagine a Flemish monoglot setting Tyndale's text letter by letter, in lexical and logical incomprehension. Solidly trained to read type in the composing stick "upside down and mirror-fashion," he would nevertheless lack a gestalt for the English words in flow, and could not spot errors that could be economically corrected in the composing stick.^^ His attempts to justify the lines by drawing on a canon of orthographic distinc- tions he did not possess, would be amateurish and require much resetting. Why need Hoochstraten — or Tyndale — tolerate such a bottleneck? I propose that in incurring the drastic risks of doing business with hunted expatriates, any printer Tyndale could have found would have had to focus on solvency and profit — in the shape of ready cash for getting out of the country, should that be necessary. Antwerp was the continental center for EngHsh exports and sustained a large English population. It would not have ranked as a prodigious achievement to retain one or more bilingual compositors who ably, swiftly (and expensively) prepared for print what Tyndale wrote. That there is in the 1528 Obedience a quantity of mechanical misprints, such as turned letters or fragments not negotiable as words (e.g., receaueh for receaueth), averaging thirty- nine instances per one hundred pages of transcription of the text, suggests that
^^ "The Theory and Practice of Transcription," New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, i 98 5-1991, ed. W. Speed Hill (Bing- hamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), 25.
^^ Wytze Gs. Hellinga, Copy and Print in the Netherlands . . . , introd. H. de la Fon- taine Verwey and G. W. Ovink (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1962), 103; Gaskell, A New Introduction, 45, 348.
^^ Gaskell, A New Introduction, 45, makes the key point that correction in the composing stick could keep down costs of the press corrector's time and of elaborate corrections in proof.
Representing Tyndale's English 41
Tyndale may have agreed to pass up the expensive steps of the press cor- rector's reading and of the resetting. Tyndale's readers could have coped with some obvious, trivial errors as long as his English had been clearly set.
There remains the question, necessary for discriminating possible composi- tors' errors from the authentic spellings in Tyndale's copy: how did Tyndale hear and speak the EngHsh he wrote, and what extrinsic corroboration can be advanced for this? I beUeve that there is, potentially, strong support in the historical/cartographic linguistics of such team eflforts as the Mcintosh source alluded to earUer. But dialectologists and phonologists, historical or contem- porary, have their gear and tackle and trim; that is, their "mystery." And with some exceptions — Charles Barber (a grammarian, principally), E. J. Dobson, A. H. Smith, and J. C. Wells^ — they seem unaware of what powerfiil appli- cations their work could have for other disciplines such as our own. In con- sulting Mcintosh I have been unable to get a purchase on what a "county dic- tionary" is, and what situation it is expected to clarify, or, if they provide dot maps to locahze pronunciations, an explanation why item maps — of full words — answer a different need. Then, when a cultural historian makes the unsupported assertion that "Tyndale spoke with a plebeian, accented vernacular voice" (all his Hfe, we are to presume^'), one is poorly tutored for a rebuttal on dialectal or phonological grounds. Penonally, I conjecture that Tyndale, beginning his long Oxford career at age eleven or twelve at the eUte Magdalen School, may have suppressed his native accent and acquired what E. J. Dobson calls "standard" English, "the 'correct' speech of the educated classes" (Dobson, 1: v). Citing the work of Derek Bickerton, Wells calls this speech the "acrolect" or "the prestige norm . . . associated with the highest social stratum" (Wells, 1: 18). It seems possible that the adult Tyndale had a two-tiered consciousness of his English, and that his native dialect — ^possibly Welsh-influenced — took over his spellings at times. Such a theory would allow us not to normalize enhlish, even if it occurs in close proximity to the standard form:
Hath [God] not made the english tonge? Why forbidde ye hym to
^ Charies Barber, Early Modem English (London: Deutsch, 1976); E. J. Dobson, English Pronunciation, 1500-1700, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957); A. H. Smith, The Place-Names of Gloucestershire, English Place-Name Society, 4 vols. (Cam- bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964-1965); J. C. Wells, Accents of English, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982). I am most grateful, as well, to Anne Hudson, who in a letter to me of 4 October 1991 vetted my decisions regarding un- usual spellings and made me aware of E. J. Dobson's book.
^' David RoUison, The Local Origins of Modem Society: Gloucestershire i500-1800 (London: Roudedge, 1992), 94.
42 ANNE RICHARDSON
speake in the enhlish tonge then / as well as in the latyne? (C3v/28— 31)
Much work from many disciplines is needed to bring Tyndale's English into the understanding it deserves. We can be most thankfiil for the effort towards a rigorous new OED. Its strong tide will lift Tyndale's great Admiral along with smaller craft. Eventually, perhaps, TLS will run a teaser, "Has WiUiam Tyndale been Overrated?" Then we'll know we've won!
T
On Editing Queen Katherine Parr
JANEL MUELLER
HE BOOKMARK WITH KATHERINE PARR'S LIKENESS THAT I BOUGHT in the shop of the National Portrait Gallery in London bore the following brief identification:
This portrait of Catherine Parr (1512-1548), the only known Ukeness of her, was painted during her four-year marriage to Henry VIII. She nursed the ailing King as well as providing kindness to his three children, Mary, EHzabeth and Edward. A contemporary described her as combining "a pregnant wittiness with right wonderfiil grace of eloquence". As Henry's sixth wife she out-Hved him; having swiftly re-married after his death, Catherine herself died in childbirth a year later.'
* The bookmark's text should have read "the only surely authenticated likeness" of Katherine Parr. See William A. Sessions, "The Earl of Surrey and Catherine Parr A Letter and Two Portraits," American Notes and Queries, n.s., 5.2,3 (April, July 1992): 128—130, who builds on Roy Strong's identification of the painter as WUUam Scrots and establishes a date for the portrait of November 1545. Among other claimed Ukenessess that I have personally seen, the miniature portrait formerly known as the Strawberry Hill miniature, now in Sudeley Casde, Gloucestershire, and the Lambeth Palace portrait that hangs in the present archiepiscopal reception room have arguable claims to genuineness. The portrait now at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire, which I know only from a black-and-white photographic reproduction available from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, appears to be a copy of the Scrots portrait.
44 JANEL MUELLER
"A pregnant wittiness with right wonderful grace of eloquence," but no word whatsoever of the evidence of these qualities that this queen put on pubUc display in the two religious prose works that she published in her lifetime. A complete unawareness of Katherine Parr's authorship is current as well in scholarly circles. As I went about working on my edition of Parr, a Hbrary staflf member at a Cambridge college reiterated an exclamation that several academics had already made to me, "But I never knew that Katherine Pan- had written anything." The staff member's colleague who stood nearby added: "And published too. How did Henry ever allow one of his queens to do such a thing?"
The answer to that question, insofar as we can surmise it, is that in Henry's lifetime — that is, before late 1547 — Katherine Parr got the king's permission to publish only what could be passed off as the demure enterprise of com- piling a vernacular aid to personal piety. We know from several essays in the valuable collection edited by Margaret Hannay, Silent but for the Word,^ that such an enterprise came just within the limits of public literary effort that could be permitted to a learned woman of royal or courtly standing by late Henrician norms. The colophon of Parr's first publication is dated 6 No- vember 1545. Its title duly (or dutifully) highlights the contents as Prayers or Medytacions, wherein the mynd is stirred . . . alwaie to longe for the everlastynge felidtee: Collected out of holy woorkes by the most vertuous and graciouse Princesse Katherine quene ofEnglande, Fraunce, and Irelande (STC 4818).
Elsewhere I have argued that these Prayers or Medytacions are no mere desultory reshuffling of excerpts firom book 3 of Thomas a Kempis' De imitatio Christi in the English translation pubUshed by Richard Whytford about 1530 (a source discovery owing to C. Fenno HofSnan, Jr.).^ Parr's Prayers or Medy- tacions is a systematic project of reauthoring, pursued in continuous minute changes that demonasticize the Imitatio and open up a loving, intimate relation to Christ as the Word of Scripture for both sexes of lay Christians. The rhetorical recasting is radical, but the devotional procedures remain traditional: private saturation in the text of the Bible and meditation according to Chris- tological patterns of interpretation. The work ends with two (later expanding to five) apparently original prayers by Parr, the first invoking God's guidance and protection for King Henry VIII, the second for men to say entering into
^ Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 1985).
^ Janel MueUer, "Devotion as Difference: IntertextuaUty in Queen Katherine Parr's Prayers or Meditations (1545)," Huntington Library Quarterly 53 (1990): 171-197; C. Fenno HofEnan, Jr., "Catherine Parr as a Woman of Letters," ibid. 23 (1959): 349-397, esp. 354 n.
Editing Queen Katherine Parr 45
battle. The match between contents and immediate circumstances of publica- tion is so clear in the Prayers or Medytadons that the grounds of permission becomes clear as well. Henry could not only countenance but directly author- ize this timely exercise in popularizing the national reUgion on the part of a queen whom he trusted enough to appoint regent of the realm while he went on his last futile campaign to recapture EngUsh territories in France in 1545.'*
Accordingly, the first seven editions of the Prayers or Medytadons — two in 1545, two in 1547, one in 1548, and two ca. 1550 — appear firom the press of the king's printer, Thomas Berthelet, and carry the stipulation "Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum" in their colophons.^ These editions are meticulously set, exhibiting such a low incidence of substantive and nonsubstantive variants, except for the constant play of spelling differences, that close inspection is required even to identify discrete editions.
The circumstances are entirely otherwise with Parr's second prose work. The lamentadon of a sinner, made by the most uertuous Ladie, Quene Caterin, be- waylyng the ignoraunce of her blind life, which first appeared with a colophon dated 5 November 1547, exactly two years after Prayers or Medytadons and, significantly, a Uttle more that nine months after Henry's death. Sometime in the spring of 1547 Katherine Parr had precipitously and secretly married Thomas Seymour, lord admiral of the realm and the boy-king's younger uncle. These continuing connections with Edward's court were enough to se- cure publication of Parr's Lamentadon by another of the royally authorized printers, Edward Whitchurch, who brought out its first two editions in 1547 and 1548, again with the stipulation of a sole privilege to publish and again with such scrupulosity in printing that the revised STC miscategorizes the second edition of the Lamentadon in the holdings of Cambridge University Library as the first edition.
Nevertheless, by the late Henrician norms that applied to its date of proba- ble composition in 1545-1546, Katherine Parr's Lamentadon of a 5m«£r registers as a scandal several times compounded. It was an original exercise of author-
* These circumstances include the complementary character of Parr's Prayers or Medytadons and the English Utanie that Archbishop Cranmer prepared and Henry authorized for use at the solemn welcome given to the English troops returning from the French wars. Parr's is a handbook for private prayer in the vernacular, Cranmer's a handbook for public prayer in the vernacular. Early recognition of their complemen- tarity is evidenced in their binding together — for example, in the Magdalene College, Cambridge, copy of the first edition of Prayers or Medytadons (STC 4818) and in the British Library copy of the tenth edition of 1559 (STC 4826).
5 These are the editions designated 4818, 4818.5, 4819, 4822, 4822.5, 4823, and 4824 in Pollard and Redgrave, eds., Short-Title Catalogue, rev. Jackson, Ferguson, and Pantzer.
46 JANEL MUELLER
ship on the queen's part. It was a public recounting of her soul's inward strug- gles with severe feelings of guilt in the process of embracing justification by faith and thus proclaiming her conversion from Catholicism to an unmistaka- bly Lutheran and hence proscribed vein of Protestantism. Most of all, this work was nothing that queen Katherine could even have imagined trying to publish after a hostile faction at court, spearheaded by Stephen Gardiner, nearly succeeded in a plot to accuse her of heresy and of both wifely and political insubordination to Henry in the spring of 1546. The very same plot brought a member of her court circle, Anne Askew, to death by burning at the stake, insuring that Askew's own written record of her first and second Examinations at the often illegally proceeding hands of the law would be at best a posthumous publication. These Examinations are the only other original work from the Henrician era, besides Parr's own, known to have been auth- ored by an English woman.^ So, then, signs of factual ignorance aside, the question put to me by the library staff member was at bottom a cognizant one. It accurately intuited the dangers braved by Katherine Parr as she auth- ored and then contrived to publish her two English works under the stamp of royal privilege, all the while that the political climate about her altered completely.
It will be obvious that I have offered these opening remarks as a not very obhque rationale for the critical edition of Parr on which I am now engaged and on which I would very much welcome suggestions and comment. Let me summarize my sense of her importance as a writer of her era and then go on to address more specifically editorial considerations. First, Katherine Parr bids for attention because of her expressiveness in documenting, through her own progression firom reworking an existing source to original composition, the complicated nuances of religious sensibility that characterize the first gen- eration of those key figures with court connections who underwent the Henrician Reformation not just as a political imperative, but ultimately as a conversion experience.^ Indeed, Parr's Lamentacion looks to be the earliest
^ For further discussion and references, see Janel Mueller, "A Tudor Queen Finds Voice: Katherine Parr's Lamentacion of a Sinner," in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds., The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 15-47, esp. 33-34.
' On the plane of Uterary composition, the conversion experience moves toward newness and rupture while always carrying a heavy residue of syncretism. Various scholars have emphasized Parr's specific indebtedness to Erasmus: see James Kelsey McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 200-234; William P. Haugaard, "Katherine Parr: The ReUgjous Convictions of a Renaissance Queen," Renaissance Quarterly 22 (1979): 346—359; E. J. Devereux, "The PubHcation of the EngUsh Paraphrases of Erasmus,"
Editing Queen Katherine Parr 47
Protestant conversion narrative in English, the launching of a genre that would eventually become crucial in and for New England Puritanism. We lack any such conversion narrative from Tyndale, say, or Cranmer, while Lati- mer's sermons make only scattered half-gestures in this direction. In the sec- ond place, there is the importance and interest of women's wimess in religious authorship in a newly Protestant England; as I have said, Parr is the only woman other than Askew to provide this kind of key transitional record. Third, there is the demonstrable evidence that Katherine Parr exerted a con- tinuing influence on Ehzabeth's piety.
The subject is too rich and extensive to treat adequately here, especially if I were to trace the intertextual connections with Parr's writings that I have noted in the writings of Elizabeth. Instead, in the interests of brevity, I v^ sketch a spectrum of rather more material Hnkages. The earliest is found in the princess EUzabeth's translation of Marguerite of Navarre's Mirror of the Sinjul Soul from French into a beautifiil caUigraphic EngHsh as a New Year's gift for queen Katherine in 1545; here Elizabeth's covering letter submits the enter- prise to her stepmother's judgment and correction while her prefatory letter "To the Reader" also marks an expUcit affirmation of justification by faith to the only reader envisaged — namely, Parr.^ As queen, the adult Elizabeth continued to venerate Katherine Parr as a model and authority for her reUgious guidance. The British Museum's Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities preserves an exquisite girdle prayer-book with covers wrought with bibHcal scenes in enamel embossed in reUef, the product of a court goldsmith's art from about 1540. According to an eighteenth-century report on a now lost memorandum that had been inserted in this opulent miniature prayer-book, it was a personal possession of queen Ehzabeth's. The attribution of ownership is plausible if unverifiable; what can be stated as fact is that the unknown original contents of this girdle prayer-book's ornate binding were replaced by a very tiny (32 mm x 40 mm) print of women-authored devo- tional materials prominently featuring Parr's Prayers or Medytacions and dated
Bulletin of the John Rylands Ubrary 51 (1968-1969): 348-367, esp. 354-360; Anthony Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr (London: Seeker & Warburg; New York: McGraw- Hill, 1973), 1-28, 144-225; and John N. King, "Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr," in Hannay, ed.. Silent but for the Word, 43-60. At the symposium "Attending to Early Modem Women," held at the University of Maryland, College Park, April 21-23, 1994, I offered evidence of her indebtedness to the work of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, executed with Thomas More in 1536 for refusing to swear under oath that Henry VIII was the supreme head of the church of England.
8 Bodleian Library, Smith MS 68, Art. 50, fols. 51i-52v. See Marc Shell's tran- scription and annotations of Elizabeth's translation in his Elizabeth's Glass (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1993).
48 JANEL MUELLER
1574 — the only recorded exemplar of this particular edition.^ Perhaps the most indicative material evidence of the continuities between Parr's and Eliza- beth's piety is the sequencing and formatting of items in the first volume of Thomas Bentley's The Monument of Matrones. This is a 1582 compilation of EngUsh women's religious writings whose title page records EUzabeth's au- thorization to publish "Cum privilegio Reginae Maiestatis." Here unfold in sequence the first English printing of Elizabeth's girlish translation of the Mirror of the Sinful Soul, retitled A Godlie Meditation, directly followed by three brief English prayers by queen Elizabeth, and just as directly followed by Kathe- rine's Lamentacion of a sinner and Prayers or Medytacions, with continuous pagi- nation. ^°
Let me now turn, as promised, to considerations specific and pertinent to the editing of Katherine Parr. There is, first, the lack of any satisfactory mod- em edition of either work. As far as I know, the Prayers or Medytacions has not been printed since 1640. The Lamentacion of a sinner has seen one reprint, in The Harleian Miscellany for 1808 and subsequent issues. ^^ However, this mod- em-spelling version comes unannotated and stripped of the copious marginal glosses that are an indispensable period feature of the early editions. It is of little scholarly value beyond the help it has provided to interested readers in making this text more widely accessible.
I have already alluded to some textual ramifications of the fact that Parr's two prose works appeared under royal authorization from the presses of Ber- thelet and Whitchurch, respectively, and were set as carefully as primers, Bibles, or the Book of Common Prayer. The Lamentacion, a text of approxi- mately 15,000 words, shows only twelve substantive variants between its first edition of 1547 and its second of 1548, the only editions to appear in Parr's lifetime. Collation and pagination are identical in 1547 and 1548 — ABCDEFgGs — although catchwords, spelling, punctuation, and page contents vary within these narrow confines. The 1548 edition of the Lamentacion offers seven substantive corrections to 1547 readings in the body of the text; to
' STC 4826.6. For further description of this superb jeweled repository for Kathe- rine's work (shelfinark MLA 94.7-29.1), see Hugh Tait, Seven Thousand Years of Jewel- lery (London: British Museum Publications, 1986), 152; on the less than complete assurance that the girdle prayer-book was Elizabeth's, see H[ugh] T[ait's] exhibition catalogue entry, No. 11, in Princely Magnificence: Court Jeweb of the Renaissance, 1500- 1603 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1980). I thank John N. King for the latter reference.
^'^ Thomas Bendey, The Monument of Matrones (London: Henry Denham, 1582) (STC 1892); I have examined the Bodleian Library's copy, shelfinark 4° C38 Jur.
" (London: Robert Dutton, 1808), 1: 286-313.
Editing Queen Katherine Parr 49
illustrate their nature, I simply list them. They consist of the change from "all thinges is all" to "all thinges in all," from "what shold I seke for refrige and comfort?" to "where shold I seke for refuge and comfort?," from "contrary" to "contrarily," from "bearing downe" to "beating downe," from "almoste great blasphemie" to "a most greate blasphemie," from "goddes wordes" to "Goddes woorde," and from "cum hedlyng" to "runne hedlyng."^^ In addi- tion, 1548 corrects three errors in 1547's marginal headings and notes, but 1 548 also introduces three new errors in numbering references and ostensibly errs fiirther in dropping two of 1547's marginal headings in the immediate contexts of page breaks. Since I can see no grounds for ascribing such rela- tively minor and intermittent substantive emendations to authorial agency, and since Parr sustained her difficult, illness-ridden, and eventually fatal pregnancy from mid-January to mid-October 1548, I propose to take 1547 as my copy- text of the Lamentadon as being closer to Parr's own spelling and punctuation but to incorporate the corrections from 1548, appropriately recorded, of course, in the apparatus.
Excluding its brief appended prayers, which vary between two and five in number from edition to edition, the Prayers or Medytacions is a considerably shorter work than the Lamentadon, at approximately 4,500 words for the body of the text proper. Again the sustained accuracy of Berthelet's printing can be gauged from the count of substantive variants — a total of sixteen yielded by collation of the five editions that had appeared by the time of Parr's death. However, and most notably, for the first two-thirds of the Prayers or Medy- tadotis there exists a holograph text in Parr's exquisite italic hand, now pre- served in the Town Hall in Kendal, Cumbria. This is a tiny volume in a chased silver casing with hinged silver covers with leaves (measuring 39 mm X 52 mm) illuminated in two shades of red, two shades of blue, and gold. Queen Katherine prepared this gift at an unknown date for an otherwise un- specified Mistress Tuke, one of the three daughters of Sir Brian Tuke, a secretary to Henry VIII.
In a 1990 article, I reUed on a 1980 pubUcation by G. E. Pallant-Sidaway that represents itself as an annotated old-speUing transcription of Parr's holo- graph at Kendal.*^ As a result, I mistakenly described and discussed the con- tents of this tiny volume as comprising an entirely difierent ordering of a subset of material from the longer printed version of Prayers or Medytadons. Three years later, with the kind permission of the Kendal Town Council
'^ Lamentadon of a sinner, sigs. 9, A8r, C3r, C3v, F3r [2], F8v. *' Queen Katherine Parr's Book of Prayers, Scribed, Decorated and Annotated for Kendal Parish Church (Kendal, Cumbria, April 1980), 32 pp.
50 JANEL MUELLER
treasurer and historian, Percy DufF, I was able to examine and transcribe Parr's Kendal holograph. As far as it goes, it is in word-for-word conformity with the longer printed versions; the reordering in Pallant— Sidaway's booklet has no basis whatsoever in Parr. The Kendal holograph offers valuable evidence re- garding Parr's own presentation of the text in versicles, like the text of scrip- ture, as well as her practices in word division, punctuation, and spelling.^'* I will use the Kendal holograph as my copy-text for Prayers or Medytacions and supply the remaining third of the text from the first edition of 1545, since its readings prove correct in fifteen of the sixteen cases of substantive variants in the early editions, the single exception being a turned letter (sig. B2r) which results in the reading "cleane" instead of the correct "cleaue." Fortunately this segment of text overlaps with Parr's holograph, which reads "cleaue," as do all the other Berthelet editions.
Finding myself out of time without the opportunity to do more than state the rationale for my edition of Katherine Parr and the considerations that have figured in my choice of copy-texts, let me conclude by enumerating some questions and problems that hang in the balance for me. One is the question of editorial intervention in the matter of paragraphing. The Prayers or Medy- tacions are no problem; their versicle format means that they are paragraphed at the end of every sentence unit. But in the sixteenth-century editions of the Lamentacion, there is a clear dynamics of exchange to be noted. The earUest editions have copious marginal headings and glosses but no paragraphing policy as such; paragraphs occur if and only if the end of a sentence on a given line does not leave room for printing the first word of the next sentence on the same line. Then along comes Thomas Bentley's Monument of Matrones (1582), which deletes all marginal headings and glosses from the Lamentacion while also dividing the text into twelve titled chapters and, more locally, into paragraph units throughout. Bentley retains the versicle format in printing the Prayers or Medytacions while also superimposing seven titled chapters on its text. His divisions are skillful, even sensitive, as is the wording of his chapter titles. Queen Elizabeth authorized Bentley's edition, which contains the first EngUsh printings of some of her own work. Can it, should it have any status in deter- mining aspects of editorial policy in a late twentieth-century critical edition where reception history might be expected to figure? But if so, on what grounds? And if not, on what grounds?
Another question that nags in my mind is whether to include letters by Katherine Parr in this edition. I have transcribed from her holographs some
^^ Although Tudor women, including Elizabeth, typically show a range of idio- syncratic spellings in their written English, Parr does not.
Editing Queen Katherine Parr 51
letters that I would like very much to incorporate: one in Latin to prince Edward, encouraging him with warm praise to keep writing to her in that language. The EngHsh letters include two to Henry in France that contain a mixture of political and domestic news and show Katherine in her dual roles as regent of the realm and wife to its sovereign; one to Cambridge University representatives who petitioned her to intercede for them with Henry and to whom in return she gave admonitions about the central place of Christian wisdom in all worldly learning; there are also several letters to Thomas Sey- mour that contain remarkable indications of his sexual magnetism for her. This is a minimal wishhst on my part.
But the Ust provokes further questions. Other letters survive in Katherine's hand or v^dth her sign manual as regent that are not so immediately interest- ing: for example, a disposition in a land dispute, a military commission. What principles apply, especially in the situation where no scholarly biography of Katherine Parr yet exists, to guide selection for a critical edition of a historic- ally early woman writer whose corpus remains small by any ordinary stan- dards? Questions of annotation become more urgent with the letters, especi- ally the ones to Henry and Seymour that are much more intelligible and dynamic in the light of their repHes, which fortunately also exist. But are such letters, not by Parr, to be printed in an edition of her works? And if they are not to be printed, but hers are, how and how far should annotation proceed? I have brought us to a point of entry into the difficult problem and the ab- sorbing challenge of working out what a poUcy of annotation should most use- fully undertake at this late twentieth-century date, even when the readership is the one that I envisage, a university-level readership with defined interests but httle or no shared grounding in Tudor history, Hterature, and culture. Again, my closing word is to invite and be grateful for your counsel.
On Editing Foxe's Book of Martyrs
JOHN N. KING
SEVERAL YEARS AGO I SUGGESTED THAT THE RENAISSANCE ENG- lish Text Society undertake preliminary discussion of the feasibility of publishing a critical edition of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs. I was not surprised when several members of the Council greeted that suggestion with incredulity. After all, the sheer size of the work staggers the imagination, and it exists in four substantially different editions of ever-increasing size and complexity that the compiler produced during his lifetime. First published in 1563, the original edition is a large folio volume of nearly 1,800 pages. That edition contains about two million words. It under- went major revision and expansion in 1570 and in 1583 as well as minor re- vision in 1576. The 1583 edition contains two volumes of about two thou- sand foho pages in double columns. With about four miUion words, that text is more than double the size of the first edition. It seems safe to say that the "Book of Martyrs" is the largest and most compUcated book to appear during the first two or three centuries of EngHsh printing history. The fourth edition is four times the length of the Bible. It poses editorial problems that are com- parable to its size.
Having provided these daunting statistics, I would like to announce that the British Academy has recendy approved a proposal from David M. Loades to prepare a critical edition of the work. The present moment provides an appropriate occasion for us to discuss the shape that a new edition of the "Book of Martyrs" should take. It seems to me that two major questions stand
54 JOHN N. KING
out. Do we need a new edition of "Book of Martyrs"? If we do, what form should that edition take?
To determine whether we need a new edition, we first need to examine the present standard edition. Few Hbraries preserve even one of the five nine- teenth-century editions that were based upon the eight-volume edition pro- duced by Stephen R. Catdey (London, 1837-1841). The 1965 facsimile re- print of Cattley's second edition (London, 1843—1849) is the version of the work that is most readily accessible in academic libraries, but it is relatively inaccessible. Claiming to base his modernization on the 1583 edition, Cattley incorporates some but not all of the material in the 1563 edition that was revised or eliminated in later editions. He disrupts Foxe's organization by rear- ranging material found in his copy text. He haphazardly moves material to difierent places within the work, or to appendices, or to footnotes. He edits, condenses, and amends marginal glosses with extreme freedom, and often moves them into footnotes or into the text as subtitles. Latin extracts find their way into footnotes. Cattley therefore produces a composite text that re- constructs Foxe's configuration of his work.
When Cattley's first volume appeared, Samuel R. Maidand censured the editor for assuming complete discretion over whether and how to alter the text. Maidand described seemingly countless examples of textual corruption; silent emendation; faulty annotation; lexicographical misunderstanding; misun- derstanding of geographical names, dates, vestments, and liturgical practices; confijsion among persons and places; mistranslation of Latin; misconstrual of Latin abbreviations and contractions; and other problems.^
The Cattley text is an unreliable guide to bibliographical investigation of the substantial differences among the four editions overseen by Foxe because it fails to indicate the edition in which a particular document originated, whether it underwent revision, or whether it was ever eliminated from or re- stored to particular editions. The Victorian editor therefore denies the histori- city of the "Book of Martyrs," the indeterminate state of its various texts, and their contingency of meaning as contributors to and products of highly speci- fic political, social, and cultural circumstances.
David Loades concurs with Cattley's belief that the 1576 and 1583 editions are substantially the same as that of 1570,^ but Thomas Freeman adds that some "material added to the 1570 and 1576 editions but not included in the
' Samuel R. Maidand, Six Letters on Fox's "Acts and Monuments," Addressed to the Editor of the "British Magazine" and Re- Printed from that Work with Notes and Additions (London: Rivington, 1837), passim.
^ David M. Loades, "A New Edition of The Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs by John Foxe" (unpublished document).
Foxe's Book of Martyrs 55
1583 edition was completely lost" from the Victorian edition. He cites the example of Edward Alin and his wife, whose escape from captivity receives no mention in the Victorian edition because Foxe cited that incident only in the 1570 and 1576 editions.^ We may note an example of how Foxe revises his text and how Cattley alters it and eradicates differences that exist among dif- ferent editions by examining an extract from the account of George Marsh as we find it in the 1563, 1583, and 1849 editions. As Warren Wooden notes, Foxe's 1563 version contains a high degree of circumstantial detail that con- tributes to a portrait of the Bishop of Chester as a persecuting prelate who dies of venereal disease because of his predilection for "whorehunting." Al- though Foxe qualifies his attack and sacrifices circumstantial detail and rhe- torical vigor in the 1583 version, the cleric's deficiencies and the cause of his death remain clear. By contrast Cattiey introduces alterations for styHstic effect and bowdlerizes his modernized version of the 1583 text by referring to rumors about a "disgracefiil disease" instead of the illness of a cleric who "was bumeth of an harlot.'"* Bowdlerization of that kind is pervasive in the Vic- torian edition.^
The Cattley edition fiirthermore eradicates evidence concerning the book-making art that went into the early editions of the "Book of Martyrs." We should remember that Foxe collaborated closely with his pubhsher, John Day, who produced what are arguably the best EUzabethan examples of com- positorial craft and woodcut illustration. The first edition of the "Book of Martyrs" contains fifty-three woodcuts, almost all of which are tailor-made to illustrate Foxe's martyrologies. Fifty-five cuts are added and only four dropped in the 1570 edition, for a total of 104 illustrations. The 1576 and 1583 edi- tions respectively contain 104 and 103 woodcuts, of which only two represent
^ Thomas Freeman, personal communication, November 29, 1992. All editions of Acts and Monuments are hereafter cited in the notes as A&M.
* Warren Wooden cites parallel texts in the Appendix o£ John Foxe (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), 117-119.
^ For example, Foxe reports that in 1558 Parisian clerics denounced a Huguenot congregation, "persuading the people most falsely, that they assembled together, to make a bancket in the night, and there puttyng out the candles, they went together, Jacke with Jylle (as they sayd) after a filthy and beasdy manner" {A&M [1570], 1049). According to the Cattley edition, the clergy persuaded the people that the Protestants "assembled together to make a banquet in the night, and there, putting out the cand- les, they intended to commit moost filthy abominations" {A&M [1877]: 4: 424). The modem edition eliminates use of colloquial idiom to satirize the Catholic clergy. I am indebted to Thomas Freeman for this example.
56 JOHN N. KING
wholly new work.^ Foxe and/or Day integrated these illustrations carefully into the body of the work by means of textual references, commentary, and annotation. By contrast, the Cattley version contains pallidly attenuated Victorian copies of the famous title page and only twenty-seven of the wood- cuts that appeared in the early editions.
By now you may have guessed my answer to the first question that I have posed. I believe that a critical edition of the "Book of Martyrs" is a major desideratum. My examination of the Cattley edition enumerates many prob- lems that modem editors would be well advised to avoid. Let me turn to my second question: What form should a new edition take?
A consensus exists among specialists in early modem history that a critical edition should be based upon collation of the four editions that Foxe revised. Taking the 1 583 edition as his copy text, David Loades would incorporate the results of collation of the other English versions overseen by Foxe into a mod- ernized edition. He also plans to transcribe the two Latin precursors of the "Book of Martyrs."^ To these materials he would add the biography of Foxe that first appeared in the 1641 edition. The edition would contain repro- ductions of all the woodcuts and a full critical apparatus. It seems likely that the Foxe project will pose editorial problems that are at least as complicated as those faced by the twentieth-century editors of the works of Thomas More, William Tyndale, and Richard Hooker. If suitable technology for computer- ized scanning of texts exists, it might ease some editorial difficulties. It would be best if the editorial team that undertakes this project included speciahsts in the history and literature of early modem Britain as well as experts in patristic studies, Byzantine studies, medieval Latin, and neo-Latin.
Patrick Collinson has issued the caveat that it would be inappropriate simply to rely upon the last edition produced during Foxe's lifetime. In each revision Foxe eliminated material "in order to accommodate more recent and exciting accessions to his knowledge." Furthermore, the compiler's manuscript papers contain narratives and source material that even he chose to exclude firom his encyclopedic history. Collinson concludes that
a basic necessity for Foxeian studies would be a critical edition of Acts and Monuments which at the very least would indicate the point of entry, or of departure, of every episode, passage or document, with
^ Ruth Samson Luborsky and EUzabeth Motley Ingram, A Guide to English Illustrated Books 1536-i603 (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998).
^ John Foxe, Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestamm (Strasbourg: Wendelinus Rihe- Hus, 1554); Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum (Basel: Joannes Oporinus, 1559).
Foxe's Book of Martyrs 57
source references and cross references to the unpublished material in the author's papers.
He cites the example of Christopher Wade, whose extremely vivid narrative first appeared in the 1583 edition. Only on the basis of collation of the third and fourth edition can we determine why the sources for this story, Richard Fletcher, the Elder and Younger, finally provided it to Foxe a fiiU generation after Wade's death.^ Another good example may be found in Hugh Latimer's words of consolation to his companion, Nicholas Ridley, in what may be Foxe's best known martyrdom. According to the 1570 edition, Latimer states: "Be of good comfort. Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day Ught such a candle by God's grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out. ..." That famous sentence appears nowhere in the 1563 account of the deaths of Latimer and Ridley. It would be of genuine critical and historiogra- phical interest to determine whether those words and others are based upon documentary records or are fictional additions by the compiler.
How would a new edition incorporate the results of collation? Because Foxe himself never stabilized his text during a lifelong process of revision, I beUeve it would be inappropriate to imitate Catdey by attempting to stabilize it now. The shape of the early editions might best be preserved if a transcript of the 1583 edition were prepared. Three separate — and voluminous — appen- dices could contain transcriptions of material absent from the 1583 edition that appeared in 1563, 1570, and 1576. An elaborate critical apparatus would be required to indicate the textual history of individual documents and narratives in line with Collinson's concerns.
What other elements should go into a new edition? As David Loades pro- poses, it should include facsimiles of the original illustrations. The commentary could indicate how woodcuts were added or deleted in successive volumes, how the placement of some of them changed as Foxe revised the "Book of Martyrs," and how difierent texts were set into empty banderoles within woodcuts. Marginaha should remain in the margins; armotation could indicate significant variation in glosses of different editions.
Every effort should be made to approximate textually significant layout and typography in the early editions. Those elements highhght the status of the "Book of Martyrs" as a compilation of documents by a variety of different hands. They therefore throw Hght on questions concerning Foxe's veracity, which dominated much early criticism. An ideal edition would approximate
® Patrick Collinson, "Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs," in Clio's Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (Zutphen, Netherlands: De Walburg Pers, 1985), 36-37.
58 JOHN N. KING
the typographical signs "that is, the shifts among different type sizes, black letter, and roman and italic fonts that differentiate Foxe's commentary from primary documents. Although the specific type fonts and sizes vary in the early editions, alternation among different fonts and sizes is both consistent and textually meaningful. I do not mean to suggest that black letter must be used, but typographical distinctions among different kinds of texts should be preserved. In the early editions, consistent usage of black letter and roman type differentiates received documents from Foxe's editorial commentary or narrative. Glosses appear in roman type and italics. Collinson notes, further- more, that even changes in running headlines and paragraphing are textually significant. Foxe's narrative concerning Elizabeth when she was a princess, for example, was originally printed in the form of extremely long paragraphs that fail to differentiate between narrative and dialogue. Paragraphing becomes shorter and shorter in successive editions until individual speeches appear in separate paragraphs that begin to approximate dramatic representation of the kind that we encounter in Jacobean plays based upon the collection. At the same time, Foxe and/or his pubHsher rewrites the running headUnes in order to enhance the providential aspect of the princess's experience."^
What kind of apparatus should a new edition contain? It would be a mis- take if it failed to address the interests of speciaHsts in both the literature and the social, political, and ecclesiastical history of early modem Britain as well as the needs of students and generally educated readers. I am afraid that an ade- quate commentary would have to be quite lengthy in order to identify cita- tions, sources, historical personages, influences, places, dates, literary genres, typological constructions of characters and events, and other more or less fac- tual information. An extended textual commentary would be required to address the issues outHned earHer in this paper. Annotation should include translations of passages in Latin and other languages. Thomas Freeman notes, furthermore, that a new edition "would make an important contribution to research on Foxe if it did nothing else but provide a good index. "^^ Indices in the nineteenth-century editions are haphazard at best and inferior to those found in the sixteenth-century editions. At the present moment readers en- counter considerable difficulty in locating specific materials in the "Book of Martyrs."
In conclusion, let me mention that I have not addressed the quahtative question of whether the "Book of Martyrs" warrants this kind of attention. I simply assume that it was a defining text of its age, a Hterary and historical
^ Personal communication, December 2, 1993. ^'^ Personal communication, cited above, note 3.
Foxe's Book of Martyrs 59
monument that served the nationaHstic interests of the EUzabethan regime. Many of us recall the famihar story of how chained copies of this massive work were placed alongside Bibles for the edification of the people in cathe- dral churches throughout the realm. I have also failed to address many issues concerning the practicaUty of the proposed scheme for a new edition. It does seem certain, however, that the project will encounter difficulties that trans- cend those that we currendy anticipate. Nevertheless, it is my hope that a new critical edition of Foxe's Acts and Monuments will eventually see the Ught of day despite the exigencies of modem editing and pubUshing that will in- evitably impede the progress of this project.
Editing Romeo and Juliet: M challenge [,] on my life''
JILL L. LEVENSON
OVER THE PAST DECADE OR SO, CONTINENTAL THEORY HAS infiltrated textual criticism in more than one way. Bibliographers use its vocabulary: concepts such as "foul papers" and "copy-text" have suddenly entered "the sphere of desire."' Outside that sphere, such con- cepts occupy a zone where they may be diminished or effaced. The author, expiring Uke a diva since the 1950s, casts only a shadow of his or her former authority. The individual text has become suspect, an inadequate representa- tion of the processes which create a Hterary work. As D. C. Greetham writes on the status of evidence, "[t]he relations between substance and accidence, whole and part, truth and accuracy, cause and effect have been called into question with renewed urgency by the postmodernist dispersal of form, authority, and essentiahsm."^ Narratives of all kinds — from the textual fictions which rationalize editorial biases to the "master" narratives which rationalize intellectual discipline and evidence — are breaking down under the pressure of
' This phrase comes from Jonathan Goldberg, " 'What? in a names that which we call a Rose,' The Desired Texts of Romeo and Juliet," in Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall M Leod (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1994), 181. Goldberg connects it with "certain post-Freudian accounts."
2 "Textual Forensics," PMLA 111 (1996): 47.
62 JILL L. LEVENSON
close examination.^ In this space the editor, as W. Speed Hill describes the function, is demoted, diminished, decentered, and deconstructed."* Amid the detritus, the editing project would seem to have reached endgame: "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished."
Yet the editing project goes on. For Shakespeare texts it flourishes: The Arden Shakespeare, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, The New Folger Li- brary Shakespeare, A New Variorum Edition, and The Oxford Shakespeare are prominent series reissuing the plays and verse; new collected editions, such as the Norton, are appearing one after the other. Among the editors, a num- ber are adapting or replacing the New Bibliographic model in order to present the text as multiple, dynamic, "a 'field' of force. "^ But there are limits. Pub- Ushers still treat editions as if they were "stable, achievable, objective, tangible substances . . .";^ that is, publishers are still concerned with the bottom line, and the newer models, such as multiple texts, tend to produce more expensive editions. Publishers have a point: the academy needs afibrdable texts to read and to teach; the nonacademic reader needs affordable and comprehensible texts to satisfy the interest sparked by a theatrical production, a film, a public lecture, or some form of review. The introduction of hypertext or Michael Warren's infinitive format might eliminate the strain Leah S. Marcus describes "between the acknowledgment of variability and the desire to reconstruct a reUable authorial text" (54). But for the time being these formulations will not displace the printed edition for classroom use or pleasure reading; and most printed editions will continue to be governed by editorial procedures which a publisher has approved.
When I began to edit Romeo and Juliet for Oxford in the late 1980s, I fol- lowed a set of instructions prepared in 1978. They directed editors to what had become an uncomfortable site between textual theory and the market- place:
The Oxford Shakespeare will present texts newly edited in the light of current scholarship. . . . We hope to provide . . . volumes which
^ For a definition of textual fictions, see Thomas L. Berger's review of The Ox- ford Shakespeare, Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography n.s. 3 (1989): 161; on "master" narratives, see Greetham, 32—33.
'* See "Where We Are and How We Got There: Editing after Poststructuralism," Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 38-46.
^ Leah S. Marcus uses this Barthean phrase in "Renaissance / Early Modem Studies," in Redramng the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: MLA, 1992), 51.
^ Peter L. ShiUingsburg, "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action," Studies in Bibli- ography 44 (1991): 38.
Editing Romeo and Juliet 63
will be economically within the reach of students and scholars, and which will be encompassable by the mind. . . . We hope to benefit fi-om our predecessors while re-examining the conventions in the interests of providing the reader with the help he needs to read the plays with an understanding of their texts and contexts. In particular, we hope to find better ways of presenting to the reader works de- signed for performance.^
With the prospective audience in mind, I started to reexamine original docu- ments in order to rethink the play's textual history. At the same time, I brought myself up to date on textual theory. Each reading corroborated the other: textual narrative and textual evidence did not match; current theory questioned accepted paradigms and oflfered a lexicon for doubt.
There are two substantive texts of Romeo and Juliet: the first quarto (Ql), printed in 1597 by John Danter and Edward Allde; and the second quarto (Q2), printed in 1599 by Thomas Creede for Cuthbert Burby. A third quarto (Q3), dated 1609, reprints Q2; a fourth, dated 1622 by George Walton Wil- liams,^ reprints Q3 with occasional consultation of Ql; the Folio reproduces an aimotated copy of Q3;^ and a fifth quarto, dated 1647, reprints the fourth. By the 1980s conjectures about the substantive versions formed a received narrative about the textual history of Romeo and Juliet, and the three important editions published between 1980 and 1986 repeated both its sequence and its style. ^° The narrative relates the fortunes of three texts: a "bad" quarto, a "good" quarto, and the original of both. Of course this account resembles several others contemporary with it, generated by the New BibUography and deahng with multiple-text English Renaissance plays. It uses the idiom of Alfired W. Pollard, who first categorized Shakespeare's quartos as "good" and "bad," and who identified the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet as bad because
^ "Editorial Procedures" (1978), 4-5. The revised "Editorial Procedures" (1991), page 7, makes virtually the same points.
* "The Printer and the Date of Romeo and Juliet Q4," Studies in Bibliography 18 (1965): 253-254.
' See S. W. Reid, "The Editing of Folio Romeo and Juliet," Studies in Bibliography 35 (1982): 43-66.
'° In chronological order, these editions are The Arden Shakespeare, edited by Brian Gibbons (London and New York: Methuen, 1980); The New Cambridge Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984); and The Oxford Shakespeare, edited by John Jowett (as part o£ Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986]).
64 JILL L. LEVENSON
it had no entry in the Stationers' Register and disagreed with the FoHo text. More than once he called Ql a "piracy," surreptitiously published.*^
This narrative began to take shape about fifty years ago. In 1948 Harry R. Hoppe determined the fate of the 1597 quarto with the title of his mono- graph The Bad Quarto of "Romeo and Juliet": A Bibliographical and Textual Study }^ After analyzing the printing history of Ql, he presented circumstan- tial evidence of memorial reconstruction by two disaffected actors, probably Romeo and Paris. During the 1940s and 1950s, W. W. Greg endorsed the legitimacy of the 1599 quarto, giving his distinguished imprimatur to a view first advanced in 1879. He claimed that most of Q2 derived firom Shake- speare's holograph, only one reprinted passage and occasional bits firom Ql.^^ Once the substantive texts had been characterized, scholars who followed Hoppe and Greg concentrated on figuring out the relationship of the quartos as well as their common original. John Jowett's Lachmannian genealogy in A Textual Companion to The Oxford Shakespeare illustrates the trend.^'^
Evidence for these speculations is scarce. It consists of three disparate kinds of facts: the dates on the title pages which indicate that Q2 was printed after Ql; differences between the two texts in length and expression; and one long segment, as well as a number of short ones, virtually identical in composition. Specifically, the first quarto is close to seventy-nine percent as long as the second (2,364 lines compared with just over 3,000 lines^^); it contains over 800 lines which are in some ways variants of corresponding Hnes in the longer quarto (see Hoppe, 181-184, 189-190); and it includes several passages which
^^ Shakespeare's Folios and Quartos: A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare's Plays 1594—1685 (London: Methuen, 1909), 65, 69. The notion of clandestine publishing derives, of course, from Heminge and CondeU's address in the Folio "To the great Variety of Readers," where they say that they have replaced "diverge /tolne, and/ur- reptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and /tealthes of iniurious impo/tors."
^^ Cornell Studies in EngUsh, 36 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
'■* See Greg's The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 61-62, and The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibli- ographical and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 229-231. For the origi- nal version, see Robert Gericke, "Romeo and JuHet nach Shakespeare's Manuscript," Shakespeare Jahrbuch 14 (1879): 207-273.
^* Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jo wett and WiUiam Montgomery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 288.
^^ The Ql count is Barry Gaines's for The Malone Society edition currendy in preparation; the Q2 count is mine.
Editing Romeo and Juliet 65
differ completely from their equivalents.'^ Yet Ql served as copy for Q2 at least once, for a passage of more than eighty lines;'^ Q2 follows this Ql passage in wording, capitals, punctuation, spelling, and typography — in par- ticular the odd use of italics for the speeches of the Nurse. It appears that the Q2 printers consulted Ql elsewhere as well.'^ As a result, bibUographers generally agree that the first quarto has influenced the second to an extent which cannot be measured with accuracy.
This indeterminate relationship has nevertheless produced the modem orthodoxy: memorial reconstruction, a concept of transmission that has re- ceived wide acceptance since Hoppe's book made its case.'' The theory holds that an actor or actors reproduced the play from memory either for pro- duction (possibly by Pembroke's company or in provincial tour) or for pubH- cation as Ql. The original, a form of Romeo and Juliet represented by Q2, may have been a variant abridged and otherwise adapted for provincial perfor- mance by Shakespeare's company; the official acting version; or both shor- tened and frill-length renderings in combination. The actor(s) would have re- membered this original from taking part in performance or reading the copy. Memory, perhaps assisted by actors' parts or bits of manuscript, may have faltered, a lapse explaining the shortness of the text. For most proponents of this theory, other failures account for other differences between Ql and Q2. Such critics evaluate the quality of reporting by the coincidence of the two texts, and they often nominate reporters who might have produced the largest number of matching Unes.
The articulation of this concept in Pollard's terms discredits the first quarto; yet Pollard's explanations collapse for lack of evidence, and the modem orthodoxy raises many questions, especially when it assumes its judgmental
'^ For example, 2.6; 3.2.57-60; 4.5.43—70; 5.3.13—17; act, scene, and Une numbers for Romeo and Juliet come from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1104-1145.
" There is some disagreement about the exact limits of the passage, which may be impossible to fix. I foUow George Walton Williams, whose critical edition sets them as 1. 2. 53B— 1.3.34 {The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet [Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1964], 105).
^^ For instance, 2.1.13; 2.4.101-103; 3.5.27-31. See Gibbons's edition, 21-23, for an overview of scholarship on these bibliographical links.
" Tycho Mommsen first published his version of the theory in " 'Hamlet,' 1603; and 'Romeo andJuUet,' 1597," The Athenaeum 29 (1857): 182; Kathleen O. Irace re- cendy endorsed it in Reforming the "Bad" Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions (Newark, DE, London, and Toronto: Univ. of Delaware Press and Associated Univ. Presses, 1994), passim. My synopsis of the concept and its appUcation to Romeo and Juliet is based on a body of scholarship that spans 140 years.
66 JILL L. LEVENSON
mode. In the first instance, non-entrance of Ql in the Stationers' Register constitutes negative evidence: it says nothing about copyright or the way Danter acquired this version of the tragedy.^° Moreover, differences between Ql and the FoUo have no immediate bearing on the pubHcation of the eariier play; they may provide a basis for appraising the two extant forms of Romeo and Juliet, but they furnish no evidence at all about the ownership of Ql.^*
In the second instance, no contemporary evidence survives to verify that any actor(s) ever reconstructed a play memorially; and it seems unlikely that reporters would have forgotten their own lines and cues.^^ More to the point, certain assumptions raise doubts about the logic of this theory. Advo- cates of memorial reconstruction generally consider the play in question cor- rupt, its state a sign of an illegitimate and therefore pirated manuscript. They presume that a stationer would have bought such a play and that a printer would have manufactured it as a book; they take for granted that such a procedure would have continued over many years, allowed by the companies and ignored by other pubUshers.^^ But no evidence confirms that any play was ever stolen from Shakespeare's company. Further, not only the actor(s) but also the stationer and printer would have taken a big risk for a small re-
^^ The connection between entrance in the Stationers' Register and copyright is discussed by Leo Kirschbaum, Shakespeare and the Stationers (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1955), 89-91, and by S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: Records and Images (London and New York: Scolar Press and Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 205. Maureen Bell gives the latest statistics for "Entrance in the Stationers' Register," The Uhrary 6th ser. 16 (1994): 50-54.
^^ It is worth noting that the distinction between "good" and "bad" has given an inaccurate impression of the quality of printing for the two quartos. In fact, the mis- takes in Ql are unremarkable in kind and number, fewer than in Q2.
^^ The contesting views represented in this paragraph come from Robert E. Burk- hart, Shakespeare's Bad Quartos: Deliberate Abridgments Designed for Performance by a Re- duced Cast (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975), 19-22; Paul Werstine, "Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad Quartos,'" Shakespeare Quar- terly 41 (1990): 65—86; David Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 9— 11; Jay L. HaUo, "Handy-Dandy: Q1/Q2 Romeo and Juliet," in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet": Texts, Contexts, and Interpretation, ed. Jay L. HaUo (Newark, DE, and Lon- don: Univ. of Delaware Press and Associated Univ. Presses, 1995), 123—150; and David Farley— Hills, "The 'Bad' Quarto of Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare Survey 49 (1996): 27-44.
^^ According to Gary Taylor's Introduction to A Textual Companion, 26, during Shakespeare's Ufetime playtexts different from those now considered authoritative were not pubhshed after 1609.
Editing Romeo and Juliet 67
turn, because playbooks did not earn high profits under the most legitimate of circumstances.^^
Fourteen years after Pollard made the distinction between good and bad quartos, Greg indicated the awkwardness with which it fit the two substantive texts of Shakespeare's early tragedy: "Romeo and Juliet is remarkable in that the bad text seems a good deal better, and the good text a good deal worse, than we are accustomed to find."^^ The relationship between the quartos is un- usually puzzling because Ql has theatrical associations which Q2 appears not to share. As a result, the bibHographical connection is compHcated not only by the processes of writing, pubUcation, and perhaps memory, but also by theatri- cal interventions of various kinds. As Paul Werstine has concluded, the early theatrical history of Romeo and Juliet may be embedded in the first quarto: "Yet it seems quite optimistic to believe that such raw stuff" as this quarto . . . will readily yield up to rational analysis the record of theatrical process it contains. "^^ It is just as unlikely that Ql will ever give an unambiguous account of the play's early textual career.
And there's the rub. Without being able to establish the copy for Ql or the connection between the substantive texts, it is impossible to begin a stemma. For this reason, the received narrative of Romeo and Juliet started to come apart in the early 1980s with reviews by some of the "new revis- ionists"^ of the Arden edition. For example, my colleague Randall McLeod (writing as Random Cloud) disconnected the sequence quarto by quarto:
At odds with the judgment of the First Quarto as Bad is the repeated acknowledgment in the pages of textual introduction that Ql is a substantive edition. . . . There is another substantive edition, however, Q2 the Good, which the editor adopts for his copy-text. . . . His formulation . . . ignores or forgets that whatever the truth about reports and production behind Ql, there must have been a manuscript that initiated it all, and that this manuscript must bear some relation — of identity or difference — to the manuscript that underHes most of
^* See Peter W. M. Blayney, "The Publication of Playbooks," in A New History ojEariy English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Colum- bia Univ. Press, 1996), 383-422.
^^ "Principles of Emendation in Shakespeare," in Aspects of Shakespeare: Being Brit- ish Academy Lectures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 147.
^^ "The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet and the Limits of Authority," typescript of a paper delivered at the 1985 meeting in New Yoric City of the Society for Textual Scholarship, 10-11.
^' I have adapted the phrase "new revisionists" fi-om D. C. Greetham's Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992), 353.
68 JILL L. LEVENSON
Q2. The editor implies that they are identical. But will he state it, and can he prove it?
McLeod proposed a new formulation: the two substantive quartos witness the multipHcity of what Shakespeare wrote; the playwright may have created Romeo and Juliet over time and through different phases, "perhaps in several different manuscripts, each perhaps with its own characteristic aesthetic, offering together several finalities. "^^
By 1988 Jonathan Goldberg extended his own review of the Arden Romeo and Juliet in a paper that began with Fredson Bowers and ended with Jacques Derrida. Whatever their provenance, he argued, both substantive quartos vest their authority in theatrical performances. This fact considered, what is the relationship of the two witnesses? "Q2 is a different version — or, rather, dif- ferent versions — of the play. It is a selection from or an anthology of a num- ber of productions of Romeo and Juliets, one of which was close to the per- formance represented by Ql. . . ." And the play itself remains, in Goldberg's translation of Derrida, a "still living palimpsest."^'
This theoretics returns my account to its point of departure. As the 1980s ended, a new skepticism was both established and, as Marcus said, "exhilarat- ing and indispensable" for a number of critics interpreting early modem texts (51), especially plays. Warren had written his seminal essay on the two ver- sions of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus; and, with Gary Taylor and Steven Urko- witz, he had challenged orthodox thinking about Quarto and Folio King Lear. Werstine had begun to publish a series of essays debating not only the narratives but the lexicon of the New Bibliography.^^ At the time when I needed to choose a control-text,-^' textual narratives were in various states of
^^ "The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos," Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 423, 429.
^^ Goldberg's review appears in Shakespeare Studies 16 (1983): 343-348; his paper, delivered at the twenty-fourth annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 4—5 November 1988, has now been published in the proceedings (see n. 1 for a complete reference), 173—201. I have taken the quotations from pages 186 and 191.
■^*' For a summary of the debate over King Lear, see Marcus, 52—53, 63. Warren's article on Marlowe, "Doctor Faustus: The Old Man and the Text," appeared in English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981): 111—147. Werstine's essays include "The Textual Mys- tery o( Hamlet," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 1-26; "'Foul Papers' and 'Prompt- Books': Printer's Copy for Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors," Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988): 232—246; and later, the article cited in n. 22 above.
^^ "Control-text" is Stanley Wells' temi, defined in both the 1978 and 1991 ver- sions of "Editorial Procedures" for The Oxford Shakespeare.
Editing Romeo and Juliet 69
deconstruction, and I could be identified as one of those editors described by Speed Hill.
Nevertheless, certain editorial decisions seemed inevitable. I concluded that the substantive texts of Romeo and Juliet represent two different and legitimate kinds of witnesses to two different stages of an ongoing theatrical event. In Q2, duphcation of several passages indicates authorial revision and therefore authorial working papers rather than a manuscript used in the theatre.^^ On the other hand, Ql shows clear signs of connection with performance. Des- criptive stage directions record stage business; reduced poetry and rhetoric accelerate the action; abbreviation results in a quickly paced, popular version of the play for a provincial tour or in London. Recently a few scholars have argued that Ql is a deliberate abridgment of Q2 for performance, made by a redactor or Shakespeare himself fi-om a holograph basically the same as the copy for Q2.^^ Peter W. M. Blayney suggests another kind of theatrical Hnk after reviewing Humphrey Moseley's address to readers of the Beaumont and Fletcher FoUo (1647). Apparently actors made copies of plays for their fiiends firom versions usually abridged for performance, writing down what had be^n spoken on stage; the quaUty of such texts would vary according to the actors' source and procedures.^"*
How could a book display both versions, the only original inscriptions fi-om the "still Uving pahmpsest"? The Oxford edition will try to meet the demands of textual theory and the marketplace by treating the quartos as two versions of the play, distinct conceptions of the work at distinct points of utterance,-'^ and by giving readers both for the price of one. With the agree- ment of Stanley Wells, the General Editor, and Oxford University Press, this
^^ Evidence of revision, authorial first and second thoughts preserved in the printed text, argue that Q2 came from Shakespeare's own manuscript drajft. Although there is now consensus among editors and other bibliographers about the copy for Q2, there had been a debate which grew increasingly elaborate until the 1950s. Gericke originated the theory that the printers of Q2 depended on Shakespeare's manuscript but consulted Ql; G. Hjort first contended the opposite, that Q2 was printed from Ql collated with a manuscript, in "The Good and Bad Quartos of 'Romeo and JuUet' and 'Love's Labour's Lost,'" Modem Language Retnew 21 (1926): 140-146.
^■* The most extensive studies of this kind are by Burkhart (in his chapter on Romeo and Juliet, 55-67), Halio, and Farley-Hills.
^'' Blayney, 393-394. A third theory about the relationship of the quartos, sup- ported by a small but growing number of scholars since the 1980s, considers Ql a first draft for Q2. Hoppe, 58—64, gives a history of the concept to 1948; Irace, 95-114, devotes a chapter to the general topic of revision and the return to this hypothesis in recent years by scholars such as Steven Urkowitz.
•^^ The appositive paraphrases Shillingsburg's definition of a "version," 51.
70 JILL L. LEVENSON
edition will include Ql as well as Q2 in modem spelling. Q2 will take its traditional position at the front of the volume with collation and commentary; it offers the fiiller version reprinted by Shakespeare's company. Ql will appear without apparatus. Although I have reduced potentially confiising duplications in Q2 (like the "dawn speech" assigned to both Romeo and Friar Laurence in the second act), I have otherwise interfered as Uttle as possible with either text.^^ But I have not pursued authorial intent. I leave pursuit of all intents to the reader, who is equipped by the commentary with detailed notes on text, language, rhetorical devices, and staging cues. The texts themselves fur- nish material evidence for speculations about the relationship between the ver- sions. In addition, I have collected projQles of 170 or so prompt books, begin- ning with those listed by Charles H. Shattuck,^^ recording their cuts and stage directions. These have been entered on a data base with a World Wide Web site that will make them available to anyone who uses my edition, or any other, of Romeo and Juliet. With its information about particular lines and stage effects, the data base becomes another means for encountering the kind of indeterminacy which characterizes a successful play. Anyone interested can explore the text — speech and action — through its permutations from the sev- enteenth to the late twentieth century. Through one book and free technolo- gy, a reader will be able to engage with as many versions of Romeo and Juliet as he or she desires.
^^ Despite the distinction they make between the two quartos — ^bad and good, il- legitimate and legitimate — ^most recent editors incorporate stage directions and readings from Ql into Q2, which they choose as copy-text. Evans's "Textual Analysis," 211— 212, is representative.
■*' Shakespeare Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalogue (Urbana and London: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965), 411-432.
'75 it upon record?'^:
The Reduction of the History Play
To History
PAUL WERSTINE
IN Shakespeare's Richard III, as Prince Edward is entering London, Buckingham has just aflmned to him that JuHus Caesar began construction of the Tower of London. The Prince replies: "Is it upon record, or else reported / Successively from age to age, he built it?" (3.1.73-74).' I quote this question in fiiU in order to call attention to the variety of what constituted histories in the early modem period. History is written record, and it is also oral report, that is, what is "reported / Succes- sively from age to age." According to the next speech given the Prince, there is not even a hierarchy to these possible sources of history: "But say ... it were not registered, / Methinks the truth should live from age to age, / As 'twere retailed to all posterity, / Even to the general all-ending day" (76-79). As Annabel Patterson has recently reminded us in her Reading Holinshed's Chronides, early modem printed histories adopted analogously inclusive proto- cols. Printed history was not only, to quote Patterson, "the grand-scale salvage and preservation in print of early documents," but also the collection of eye- witoess reports, of anecdotes, and of allegedly verbatim accounts of speeches
' All references to Richard HI are to the New Folger Shakespeare edition of the pby, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Washington Square Press, 1996).
72 PAUL WERSTINE
and the like.^ The compilers of the Chronicles would even on occasion pub- lish two incompatible eyewitness accounts of the same event, without privi- leging one in relation to the other and without trying to construct a single truth about the event through comparison of the accounts.
Rather different protocols are now in place for the representation of his- tory in the editing of Richard III and other early modem history plays, many of whose editors appear to be influenced by G. Thomas Tanselle's 1979 essay entitled "External Fact as an Editorial Problem."^ Adopting a structuraUst position, Tanselle sought to establish conventions that editors of any texts whatsoever might employ. Unlike the compilers of Holinshed's Chronicles, he presented textual multipUcity as an opportunity for editorial intervention:
References to external fact raise textual questions because they call at- tention to a second "text" (the historical fact) with which the text under consideration can be compared. . . . The presence in a text of quotations, paraphrases, or references to historical fact undoubtedly raises some perplexing editorial questions; but it also provides editors with a splendid opportunity of demonstrating what critical editing at its most effective can accomplish. (46-47)
As in all his writing, Tanselle advocated editorial estabUshment of "the text intended by the author at a particular time." Editing, in Tanselle's con- struction of it, thus becomes a logocentric project if there ever was one; nonetheless, Tanselle's arguments deserve respect for their subtlety, judgment, and sophistication. Discussing references to historical fact, he proceeded advis- edly, asking editors first "to consider whether a correction can realistically be undertaken. . . . [I]f the erroneous information has been referred to repeatedly or made the basis of fiirther comment, there is no way to make the correc- tion, short of more extensive rewriting and alteration than a scholarly editor can contemplate" (45). What's more, Tanselle did not license editors to make substitutions just because they are possible. He continued:
But in the case of errors that can feasibly be corrected, the editor must take up the second, and more difficult, kind of consideration, to de- termine whether or not they ought to be corrected. It is here that the editor's critical assessment of all relevant factors is crucial — an assessment of the nature of the sentence and passage where the error occurs, the observed habits of the author, the conventions of the time.
2 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 37, 32-55.
3 Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979): 1-47.
The Reduction of the History Play 73
... In a critical edition the treatment of factual errors can be no mechanical matter, covered by a blanket rule. (46, 3)
Poststructurahsm has problematized Tanselle's arguments in several related ways. As I have already suggested in citing the protocols employed in Holins- hed's Chronicles, the citation of detextualized "historical facts" abstracted from documents, anecdotes, etc., is anachronistic for editors of early modem texts. As Bill Ingram has reminded us: "the very etymology of 'fact' should teach us that it is a construct, not a given or datum";^ as constructions, "facts" have been produced under specific historical conditions. In Hght of Ingram's obser- vation, Tanselle's approach seems curiously ahistorical: he appears to be dis- cussing the whole of editorial practice, but almost all his examples are derived from recent editions of nineteenth-century texts, and he never discusses the treatment of "external fact" across the history of editing. It has a history, as Margreta de Grazia has demonstrated in her work on the late eighteenth- century Shakespeare editor Edmond Malone, whom she credits with develop- ing the practice of regialating and correcting one document — in this case, Shakespeare's plays and poems — ^with reference to other documents, often, for the history plays, the Chronicles of Holinshed and Hall, to which, as Patterson has shown, Malone's very practice was alien. De Grazia's identification of this practice as a production of Malone's own historical context is a bit of an over- simplification— ^but it may not be much of one because, although there is some evidence of Malone's practice in earUer eighteenth-century Shakespeare editing, Malone pursued the correction of historical fact in Shakespeare with a rigor that exceeds that of any of his predecessors.^ In this regard Malone continues to be influential upon today's editors in their search for opportuni- ties to bring plays in line with accounts from chronicles.
There have long been attempts to interpret some variants between early printed texts of Shakespeare's plays as evidence that Shakespeare and his con- temporaries themselves were interested in making playtexts conform to chronicles. A prominent and, in editions, persistent example comes from Richard III. The FoUo version once uses three of the names of what for us is a single historical figure as if the three names referred to three different people named Lord Rivers, Lord Woodeville, and Lord Scales:
First Madam, I intreate true peace of you. Which I will purchase with my dutious seruice.
* The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Eliza- bethan London (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), 19.
^ Shakespeare Verbatim (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), esp. 126-131.
74 PAUL WERSTINE
Of you my Noble Cosin Buckingham, If euer any grudge were lodg'd betweene vs. Of you and you, Lord Riuers and of Dorset, That all without desert haue frown'd on me: Of you Lord Wooduill, and Lord Scales of you, Dukes, Earles, Lords, Gentlemen, indeed of all.
(sig. r3v; TLN 1187-1194; 2.1.64-71)^
The Quarto version makes no mention of either Lord Woodeville or Lord Scales, since it does not print the Folio Une in which these names appear:
First Madam I intreate true peace of you. Which I will purchase with my dutious seruice. Of you my noble Coosen Buckingham, If euer any grudge were logde betweene vs. Of you Lo: Riuers, and Lord Gray of you, That all without desert haue firownd on me. Dukes, Earles, Lords, gentlemen, indeed of all.
(sig. D4-4v)
Even though the Quarto also does not print hundreds of other FoUo lines whose absence from the Quarto has never been rationally accounted for, nevertheless a number of scholars and editors have explicitly argued that in this instance some agent excised this single line referring to Woodeville and Scales in the interests of historical accuracy. "^ It may be noted how close this imaginary agent is to the modem scholarly editor in rather unobtrusively nip- ping out this single line without engaging in any of the substantial rewriting and alteration that is forbidden the contemporary editor by Tanselle. If this imaginary agent were interested in what we have come to regard as historical fact, it is surprising that he would leave so much historical error in the Quarto for later editors to disclose and sometimes also correct. For example, this agent allowed into the Quarto repeated indeterminacy about just how many brothers Queen Elizabeth had — a question intimately related to the Rivers—
^ The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. Prepared by Charlton Hinman, with a new introduction by Peter W. M. Blayney (New York: Norton, 1996).
^ Kristian Smidt, Iniurious Impostors and Richard III (New York: Humanities Press, 1964), 98-99; Smidt, Memorial Transmission and Quarto Copy in Richard III (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 42, 44; Anthony Hammond, ed. King Richard III, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1981), 17-18; Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 228- 229.
The Reduction of the History Play 75
Woodeville-Scales variant just discussed. Sometimes the Quarto gives Elizabeth "brothers"; sometimes it gives EUzabeth only a single "brother." (The Folio, on the other hand, is both consistent and, from our viewpoint, historically accurate in always giving Elizabeth "brothers."^)
There are so many other examples in Richard III of what we would call "historical error" that I have space to mention only those in the first act — all are found in both Quarto and Folio, which, as is usually the case with dif^ ferent early printed versions of the same play, are hardly distinct texts. In both texts. Queen Margaret appears in England after her exile to France, an error that aroused Malone's impatience: "After the battle of Tewksbury, in May, 1471, she was confined in the Tower, where she continued a prisoner till 1475, when she was ransomed . . . and removed to France, where she died in 1482. The present scene [that is, 1.3, where Margaret is first onstage] is in 1477-1478. So her introduction in the present scene is a mere poetical fic- tion" (19: 43). Malone also called attention to the discrepancy between the Chronicles and the half-dozen Unes in 1.4 in which Clarence protests that he was denied due process before being sentenced to death, lines that could easily have been cut from the Quarto by an agent interested in historical accuracy, but which are nevertheless in the Quarto. According to Malone, "Shakespeare has followed the current tale of his own time, in supposing that Clarence was imprisoned by Edward, and put to death by order of his brother Richard, without trial or condemnation. But the truth is, that he was tried and found guilty by his Peers, and a bill of attainder was afterwards passed against him" (19: 63). As Theobald was first to point out in 1733, the FoUo and Quarto texts of Richard III are also both in error in calling Lord Stanley the Earl of Derby because he was not "created Earl of Derby until the accession of Henry the Seventh," the event with which the play ends (quoted in Malone 19: 35). Thus Theobald's edition and many following it change Derby to Stanley in stage directions, speech prefixes and dialogue, an easy change metrically, but not one made by the historically minded Quarto agent of modem editorial narrative. Quarto and Folio Richard III also share the misrepresentation of Anne as Prince Edward's widow even though, according to so-called historical fact, the two were only betrothed when Edward was killed (Hammond, 35n). Tanselle quite properly counselled editors to have regard to "the observed habits of the author" in assessing whether corrections ought to be made. It is
8 Compare TLN 502, 533, 1465 (not in the Quarto), 2863, 2916, and 3170 (i.e., 1.3.38, 69, 2.3.30, 4.4.94, 147, 400), where the Folio invariably prints "brothers," to the Quarto's sigs. B4, 14, and I4v, where it too has "brothers," and to sigs. B4v and K3, where it inexplicably has "brother."
76 PAUL WERSTINE
hard to observe a habit of historical accuracy in the author or in any other agent involved in the publication of Richard III in either of its versions.
Tanselle also asked editors to be aware of "the conventions of the time." In assessing these conventions we might look at Massinger's strikingly problematic approach to what we now call historical fact in his 1631 play Believe as You List. When he first wrote the play, it was an account of one of the pretenders to the Portuguese throne who had turned up in Italy more than thirty years before near the end of the sixteenth century, claiming to be the lost King Sebastian of Portugal; this pretender had been persecuted and eventually executed by the Spanish. His unfortunate story had been detailed in three pamphlets originally published in English translation at the beginning of the century and never reprinted. Massinger based his play very closely on the pamphlets and on a French source first published in 1605.^ Massinger included in his play not only the alleged King Sebastian's itinerary in Italy but exact details of his complexion and physical deformities. The censor Henry Herbert forbade production of the play, writing in his office book: "This day being the II of Janu. 1630, I did refuse to allow of a play of Messinger's because itt did contain dangerous matter, as the deposing of Sebastian king of Portugal, by Phihp the [Second,] and ther being a peace sworen twixte the kings of England and Spayne."^^ Massinger then rewrote the play — that is, Uterally reinscribed it; his rewriting is now the only extant version. With help fi-om Edward Knight, book-keeper of the King's Men, Massinger expunged all reference to Portuguese-Spanish affairs, all reference to early modem Europe at all, changed the setting to Asia Minor around 200 BC, made his hero Antiochus the Great, whose name is metrically equivalent to "Sebastian," and left in both the shape and details of the alleged King Sebastian's career.^ ^ There is then virtually no relation between classical accounts of Antiochus'
^ The identity of Massinger's sources has been known for a long time: see Charles J. Sisson, Believe as You List by Philip Massinger, Malone Society Reprints (London: Malone Society, 1927), xvii— xviii; and Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, eds. The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 3: 294— 296. Susan MacDonald of the University of Western Ontario has forthcoming an arti- cle offering, as one part of its argument, a detailed comparison of the play and its sources.
^'^ Joseph Quincy Adams, ed. The Dramatic Records of Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623-1673 (Rpt. New York: Blom, [1964]), 19.
^^ For the identification of Knight's hand in the manuscript, see J. Gerritsen, ed. The Honest Mans Fortune (Groningen, Djakarta: Wolters, 1952), xxiv.
The Reduction of the History Play 77
career and Massinger's play.'^ As Sisson put it in his Malone Society edition of Believe as You List, "Massinger . . . apparently endeavoured to save himself trouble as much as possible" (xix). And so Massinger at first writes a play about a claimant to the Portuguese throne that is marked by what would be for us today a high standard of historical accuracy simply because it is based so closely upon contemporary accounts of this claimant, and then he makes the play about Antiochus. In changing the names of his setting and his characters, he produces a text that is utterly unrelated to what we call historical fact. From this example, it is hard to see how our notion of "historical fact" neces- sarily has any bite on most editors of early modem EngUsh drama. ^^
Massinger and Knight's practice may throw a shadow of doubt over any editorial presumption that playwrights and acting companies of the early modem period would seek historical accuracy. Nonetheless, two recent edi- tors of Henry Krely to a considerable extent on just such a presumption when they rename the Dauphin in the play's Agincourt scenes on grounds that his- tory records no Dauphin at the battle.'"* Both these editions are based almost entirely on the Folio text of the play, the much fuller version in which the Dauphin is represented at Agincourt; both editors do rely, however, on the Quarto text for its substitution of the name Bourbon for that of the Dauphin in the Agincourt scenes. The Quarto's naming is to be preferred, in the view of these editors, because some agent in the creation of the Quarto was, like these modem editors, sufficiendy attentive to history as to remove the Dauphin firom Agincourt for the reason that there is no chronicle record of his presence there. For the existence of this kind of agent in the textual history of Henry V there is no more corroborating evidence than there was in
'^ For this conclusion I am in part indebted to a paper by Lorin Schwarz pre- sented in my graduate seminar in 1994.
'^ There are notable exceptions, of course, as, for example, in some of Ben Jonson's work, for which he himself supplied historical documentation.
'^ See Gary Taylor, ed. Henry V, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), esp. 24-26, and Andrew Gurr, ed. King Henry V, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), esp. 223—225. Editorial sub- stitution of Bourbon for the Dauphin was initially grounded on analysis of the possible doubling patterns for staging the Quarto (Stanley WeUs and Gary Taylor, Modernizing Shakespeare's Spelling [With Three Studies in the Text of Henry V\ [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979]) that was seriously called into question by reviewers (See Shakespeare Studies 16 [1983]: 382—391). These editors' massive intervention in the Folio text seems to me far to exceed anything TanseUe envisioned in his essay. The most recent editor of Henry V, T. W. Craik in the Third Arden series (London: Roudedge, 1995), does not follow Taylor and Gurr, thereby repudiating their assumption that history plays need to meet standards of historical accuracy.
78 PAUL WERSTINE
the case of Richard III. Indeed, from the modem point of view of historical accuracy, a persistent faiHng of Shakespeare's Henry V, in both FoHo and Quarto, Ues in its misnaming of its characters. Both FoHo and Quarto mis- name the Archbishop (of Canterbury) as a bishop. Throughout the play, both use the name Exeter for a character who, in history, did not become Duke of Exeter until after the Battle of Agincourt, which does not take place until the play's fourth act; in history then, there was no Exeter at Agincourt. Both Folio and Quarto give the French herald the name Mountjoy as a proper name when, in "fact," it is not a proper name, but the name of his office. And finally, again throughout the play, both texts employ the name Warwick for a character who, in history, became the Earl of Warwick two years after the Battle of Agincourt — there was no Warwick either at Agincourt. The Quarto compounds this particular historical slip when it expands Warwick's role (Malone 17: 264—265, 370, 440). If there had been some agent involved in the preparation of the Henry F Quarto who shared with some of the play's editors an interest in historical accuracy, this agent missed most of his oppor- tunities to act.
For editors who attempt to abstract historical facts from their discursive contexts and then use them to regulate early modem playtexts, perils can sometimes arise because, as Homi Bhabha has observed, history can always only be half made because it is always being made.^^ The ongoing construc- tion, destruction, and reconstruction of history can be observed in the edito- rial handling of a particular crux in Henry V, my last example. As Henry exchanges greetings with the play's French King and Queen in the play's last scene, the French King greets him in the First Folio text of 1623 as "Most worthy brother England," but two lines later the French Queen addresses him as "Brother Ireland" (sig. I6v; TLN 2997, 2999; 5.2.10, 12). The Second Folio of 1632 changes the French Queen's greeting to "Brother England," and it is the Second Folio that has been followed in all subsequent editions of the play until 1995.^^ Editorial allegiance to the Second Folio may seem quite inexplicable since exhaustive study of this Folio earlier this century has re- vealed that its text has no claim to any authority beyond that of the printing house. ^^ Yet this editorial allegiance can be explained with reference to an editorial history that has been made up, albeit rather passively, by the long se- quence of Shakespeare editors. First, since the Third Folio is a reprint of the
^^ Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 3.
^^ See Henry V, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Washing- ton Square Press, 1995). All references to the play are to this edition.
^~' Matthew W. Black and Matthias A. Shaaber, Shakespeare's Seventeenth-Century Editors i 632-1 68 5 (New York: MLA and London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937).
The Reduction of the History Play 79
Second, and the Fourth a reprint of the Third, and, further, since Rowe's edition of 1709 is based largely on the Fourth Folio, changes made in the Second FoUo had an unimpeded path into the eighteenth century. Then as these readings continued to get reprinted in the next three centuries, re- peatedly being put "upon record," they acquired the authority of a cumulative editorial tradition. Now, when there arise editors who represent themselves as editing Shakespeare only to disrupt tradition and thereby somehow make the world a better place, even these self-advertised transgressive editors remain in subjection to and compUcit in the making up of tradition.'^
What distinguishes some contemporary editors from their predecessors are the justifications that they offer for continuing to print traditional but unau- thoritative readings. One recent editor takes for granted that in the French Queen's greeting of Henry as "Brother Ireland" the word "Ireland" is a mistake for the word "England" and that the Second Folio's "England" re- stored the reading of the lost manuscript printer's copy for the First FoUo. This editor thus creates a micro-history that will explain how this putative "error" could have arisen. He w^rites that in the Hand D portion of the play manuscript The Booke of Sir Thomas More, which, some scholars have argued, is in Shakespeare's handwriting, the word "England" is spelled with an initial "I." "A similar manuscript spelling," he suggests, "might have misled [the First FoHo's] Compositor A into reading it as 'Ireland'" (Gurr, 196).'^ A second recent editor presents another explanation. According to him, "the substitution of 'Ireland' for the clearly required 'England' in '...brother Ireland' seems almost certain to be Shakespeare's own 'Freudian sUp' — a sUp natural enough in 1599" (Taylor, 18), but a slip that he thinks needs editorial correction — a view mandated by Tanselle, who requires editors to distinguish between authors' unconscious sUps and conscious intentions, as if it were possible to do so in an early printed text (2, 34).
I'd Uke to reflect briefly on how these editorial representations of the word "Ireland" as an error for the word "England" reproduce — I am sure uninten- tionally— one sixteenth-century English imperial discourse about Ireland. On the assumption or with the conviction that an EngUsh king, "brother
'^ I am not trying to suggest that it is easy to get out from under editorial tra- dition. No doubt there are ways I too have blindly followed traditions from which in future I will wish I had extricated myself.
'^ Those editors who fashion palaeographical justifications for emending the Folio's "Ireland" to "Engjand" also invoke the appearance of the word "in-land" in the Folio on sig. h2, TLN 289, 1.2.148. They construct this perfecdy good word as an error for "England," an error into which the compositor was allegedly drawn by a putative "Ingjand" manuscript spelling (Gurr, 214).
80 PAUL WERSTINE
England," cannot also at the same time be "brother Ireland," these editors take for granted that the discursive construction of EngUsh national identity in opposition to the Irish was already a completed project by the time of Shakespeare's Henry V. As analyzed by Nicholas Canny, Michael Neill, Peter Stallybrass, Ann Rosalind Jones, and Willy Maley among others, this project was one in which the EngUsh reserved as exclusive to themselves such traits as godUness, order, civility, and decency by presenting the Irish as errant (like the word "Ireland" in Henry V), barbaric (in every sense including "lin- guistically corrupt"), lawless, subhuman, wild, pagan, even cannibalistic.^^ This discourse in turn justified England's barbaric treatment of the Irish, and something of this barbaric treatment, I acknowledge, is to be found elsewhere in the text of Henry V, especially in the characterization of Macmorris. This stage Irishman is ridiculed by the dialogue as barely articulate and not quite intelligible. Michael Neill has argued that Macmorris's very name indicates that his Uneage is not to be understood as GaeUc Irish; rather he is to be thought of as a degenerate descendant of the medieval Anglo-Norman inva- ders of Ireland, who were assimilated by the Gaelic Irish: "Captain Macmorris [is] an 'Irishman' whose hybrid surname and savage temper reveal him as an exemplar of that 'bastardlike' degeneracy to which EngUsh conquerors were prone [in one imperial discourse] in the 'Land of Ire'" (19). If Macmorris constituted the sole representation of Ireland in the play and if there were only a single discourse of Ireland at the play's time, then it would seem unUkely that Henry could be greeted in the play as "brother Ireland." Editors might in such circumstances have grounds for representing the reading "brother Ireland" as a degeneration of "brother England." Whether the aUeged textual degeneration firom "England" to "Ireland" took place in the bog of Shakespeare's unconscious or in the slovenliness of the otherwise pre- cise Compositor A, this linguistic degeneration would be analogous to the aUeged degeneration of the transplanted English-Irish Macmorris.^^
^^ Canny, "The Theory and Practice of Acculturation: Ireland in a Colonial Con- text," in Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World i 5 60-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988), 31-68; Neill, "Broken EngUsh and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic Power in Shakespeare's Histories," Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 1-32; Stallybrass and Jones, "DismantUng Irena: The SexuaUzing of Ireland in Early Modern England," in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al. (New York: Roudedge, 1992), 157-171; Maley, "Shakespeare, HoUnshed, and Ireland: Re- sources and Con-texts," forthcoming. I am grateful to Dr. Maley for the opportunity to read his essay in manuscript.
^^ For Compositor A's precision, see Alice Walker, "The FoUo Text of 1 Henry IV" Studies in Bibliography 6 (1954): 45-59.
The Reduction of the History Play 81
But the English othering of Ireland was not yet complete in the sixteenth century; it was, in Homi Bhabha's phrase, only half made up. What's more, the othering of Ireland was not the only English imperial discourse of Ireland at the time of Henry K or in Henry V itself Instead, the othering of Ireland was crossed by a contradictory discourse of EngUsh desire for the assimilation of Ireland, and for the identification of England with Ireland. Sir John Davies presented this second imperial discourse of Ireland in his Discouerie of the True Causes why Ireland was neuer entirely Subdued (1612) as he looked forward to a time in the very near fiiture when EngUsh justice will have
reclaymed the Irish firom their wildnesse, caused them to cut off their Glibs and long Haire; to conuert their Mandes into Cloaks; to conform themselues to the maner of England in al their behauiour and outward formes. ... as we may conceiue an hope, that the next generation will in tongue & heart, and euery way else, becom English, so as there will bee no difference or distinction, but the Irish Sea betwixt us. (sigs. Mm2-2v)
Pride of possession of an Ireland imagined to be assimilated into a growing EngHsh empire is also available to be read in Henry V. Henry woos Katherine with this offer, "England is thine, Ireland is thine, France is thine" (5.2.248- 249), the scheme of asyndeton reducing what have since become independent nations to equal status as possessions of the English crown. ^ In this second discourse, the history in which Ireland will have become the opposite against which England will have defined itself as a nation has not yet been made up — ^not made up, that is, until editors — ^mistakenly to my mind — make it up when they change "brother Ireland" to "brother England." In the un emended Foho text there is room for an Irish reader to construct a position from which to read the text as imputing value to Ireland — even if only as an English possession; from the Second Folio and all subsequent editions, the Irish reader is arbitrarily excluded, just as she has been excluded from so much of the his- tory of Ireland subsequently made up in English discourse.
Tanselle's call to editors to have regard for external fact may raise some intractable problems for editors of early modem playtexts, who may have difficulty reducing these texts to the singularity of "historical fact," when the texts belong to an age in which history was compiled with regard to the plurality of sources and voices through which it was preserved. So it may be
^ Compare The True Tragedie of Richard the third (London, 1594): "Henry the seuenth, by the grace of God, King of Engjiand, France, and Lord of Ireland" (sig. H4v).
82 PAUL WERSTINE
necessary for editors of these playtexts to conceive of history as histories in the manner of the new historicism that has followed in the wake of post- structuralism. The validity of this advisory is independent of the validity of my example from Henry V. What I am suggesting is revising editorial protocols, not discarding them. Since Shakespeareans continue to use modem editions even after poststructuralist critiques of them, it would seem to the point to modify and improve the protocols of editing in the light of ongoing historicist scholarship.
Preposterous Posts tructuralism,
Editorial Morality and the
Ethics of Evidence
STEVEN URKOWITZ
SEVERAL MAJOR OPPORTUNITIES FOR EDITING AFTER POSTSTRUC- turalism, I believe, arise from thinking about Shakespearean playscripts as tentative or ad hoc suggestions for performances, and editing the multiple-text plays such as King Lear or Romeo and Juliet may perhaps best be approached as opportunities for editors to offer alternative suggestions for dif- ferent performances on different occasions with different actors and audiences. In his important essay " 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad' Quartos" (Shakespeare Quarterly 41 [1990], 64-86), Paul Werstine suggests that a truly poststructu- rahst approach to Shakespearean multiple-text plays would be to construct "a narrative that includes post-structuraHst differential readings of multiple text works." Such a narrative, he suggests, should "keep in play not only multiple readings and versions but also the multiple and dispersed agencies that could have produced the variants" (86). In practice, however, constructing narratives about plays is not necessarily the same as generating editions of plays, or de- veloping scripts to use in productions of plays. Though it might be. Post- structuralist editors of Shakespeare (or indeed editors of any critical persuasion) now have both thrilling opportunities and awesome responsibihties to invent ways of celebrating the recognizably dispersed authorities of documentary evidence, editorial tradition, and contemporary judgment. Creating a singular "authoritative" text for general readers will all too likely perpetuate misap- prehensions of all artistic processes and particularly the communal production
84 STEVEN URKOWITZ
of dramatic art within densely figured historical communities such as Shakespeare's.
I would Uke to explore one very small textual occasion I believe invites imaginative editing of the poststructuraUst kind: a single moment in King Lear. I've written about it before (Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear [1980], 38—40). Like my predecessor in the reformer's trade, Lemuel Gulliver, I had hoped the timely publication of my observations would have brought about some salutary and immediate amendment among the practitioners of editorial arts and crafts. But, as many of my fiiends had warned, in the past fifteen years my proposed reforms have not yet been much realized in contemporary editions. Unlike Lemuel GuUiver I nevertheless continue to be hopeful. I continue to cajole my editorial colleagues. And also I may yet encourage some editorially smitten, energetic, and otherwise unemployed young scholars. Perhaps one or two young men or women will leap into what I feel should prove an exciting and rewarding task: an expansive and generously poststructural editing of Shakespeare.
As bait I offer an enticing example, taken from the opening scene of the 1608 Quarto and 1623 First FoUo texts oi King Lear. Kent has been banished for his intemperate loyalty; he bids a jaunty farewell to the King and court, and he exits the stage. With no intervening events indicated in either of the scripts, the Earl of Gloucester escorts onstage France and Burgundy, suitors for CordeUa. Here is the Quarto text:
Thus Kent O Princes, bids you all adew, Heele shape his old course in a countrie new. Enter France and Burgundie with Gloster. Glost. Heers France and Burgundie my noble Lord.
(Ql B3-B3v)
The Folio version of the same passage reads:
Thus Kent, O Princes, bids you all adew,
Hee'l shape his old course, in a Country new. Exit.
Flourish. Enter Gloster with France, and Burgundy, At- tendants. Cor. Heere's France and Burgundy, my Noble Lord.
(TLN 200-204)
The texts present two dramatically significant differences, both with interesting consequences affecting a stage enactment of the passage should the scripts be used to govern performances. (Here is my local definition for "dra- matic significance": a textual variant is dramatically significant if a person who doesn't understand the language nevertheless could observe differences in per-
Preposterous Poststructuralism 85
formances of the alternative versions.) The first significant variant is "Flourish" only in the FoUo stage direction. The second: the speech-prefix "Glost." in the Quarto appears as "Cor." in the FoUo.
First, a poststructural editor trying to make sense out of the divergent evi- dence should, I beheve, invent a way to signal to readers the possible theatri- cal effect of the flourish, which does not appear in Q. After the heraldic trumpets announced the entry of King Lear earUer in the scene, the Quarto's "No flourish" indicates the sound of one hand clapping, a hugger-mugger omission of celebratory music appropriate to high nobihty moving through ceremonially charged space. In our own roles as editors responsible for pre- senting King Lear to readers perhaps unfamihar with theatrical scripts, we might help such readers imagine or even encourage them to assay in a rehear- sal-room or classroom differential enactments of this moment that would pro- pel Uve actors into the scene with fictional energy and recognizably famiHar purpose.
Of course, we can't know why the "Flourish" call does not appear in the Quarto. We cannot tell if "Shakespeare the Bard" added the Flourish that shows up in the Folio or chopped it out of whatever manuscript stood behind the Quarto. We can't tell if the Royal Trumpeter who picked up extra money doing gigs at the Globe made the suggestion, or even if, on one exu- berant spring day, he ad-Hbbed the vivid trumpet call and then someone thought to write it into the script that later became the Folio. We don't know if Globe theatre performances of Lear always had the trumpet flourish because someone told the trumpeter, once, orally, but forgot to write it into the script until after the Quarto was printed. And we don't know if, perhaps, in the Globe theatre they never had the flourish at all despite the instruction printed in the FoUo. Maybe the journeyman compositor in Nathanial Butter's printing house left it out of the Quarto, or maybe the apprentice FoHo compositor in Jaggard's shop fifteen years later in a fit of musical expansiveness plunked it in. We don't know.
But thought is free, and a poststructural editor could include on her multi- media CD-ROM a few all-purpose trumpet calls. Imagine an icon to cUck that would promptly supply the reader of the CD-ROM with, say, Wynton Marsahs playing a Renaissance flourish on a Renaissance instrument. Or even in a low-budget, simple ink-and-paper edition, a poststructural editor could coach her readers about possible actions that would reahze the variant perfor- mative potentialities of this textual variant.
Imagine that an editor suggests to her readers that, in the fiction of the play, the characters onstage quickly comprehend the dismal prospects of the forthcoming nuptial conversations. Any character with such knowledge could signal the trumpeter to hold off a conventional celebratory fanfare. Imagine if
86 STEVEN URKOWITZ
Goneril were to make such a move. Or if King Lear imperiously warns off the trumpets. Or if CordeHa gestures for silence. Actors love to perform such actions onstage; Shakespeare's scripts are so beloved by actors in no small degree because they encourage such imaginable and playful doings. They would be fun to try out, adopt, or discard, and a poststructural edition of the play well might encourage such trials in an effort to underscore the tentative and experimental parameters of theatrical scripts in their most practical and professional uses. Such play of possibilities may or may not alter the "mean- ing" of King Lear on an abstract scale, but the trumpet or its absence can intensely affect an actor's and audience's experience of the moment.
To pre- and postmodern editors, a more problematic textual variant arises where the speech prefix reading "Glost." in the Quarto appears as "Cor." in the Foho. The alternative scripts give interesting possibilities to consider and to play with.
Who will speak the Hne that will move the action forward? Gloucester? "Cor." for Cornwall? Or maybe even "Cor." for Cordeha? Suppose that the words are said by the character indicated in the Quarto text, the salacious Earl of Gloucester, he of the foul mouth and slippery codpiece? Suppose as one possibility Gloucester enters as the happy usher of the two noble suitors. Leading this short parade of dignitaries, Gloucester may not have heard about Cordelia's disgrace. Considering momentarily a jaunty Gloucester as master of ceremonies, we may recall a parallel theatrical moment in Troilus and Cressida when lecherous Pandarus oversees the first interview between that pair of potential bedfellows. Here the actor playing jolly old Gloucester — soon to be called "blind Cupid" — may well be thinking about these lucky nobles at "good sport" with Cordelia. "Here's France and Burgundy, my noble Lord." Or suppose that Gloucester has been warned by a servant or a courtier who may have been sent out earlier by Lear: "Call France. Who stirs? Call Bur- gundy." Gloucester may in that case speak his line as a helpless ameliorator, as we see him later saying to Lear, "I would have all well betwixt you" (TLN 1396). "Here's France and Burgundy, my noble Lord."
And we have an alternative textual possibility: this same action is intro- duced into Lear's consciousness not by Gloucester, as is directed by the Quarto speech prefix, but instead by CordeUa or by the Duke of Cornwall. One of the possible speakers suggested by the Folio text, Cornwall was just enfiranchised with half the rich dowry earlier planned for Cordelia and one of these suitors. Following the Folio as a script to govern and to suggest stage action, we may imagine for a moment that King Lear has turned himself away firom the upstage doors on the Globe platform. Perhaps he is looking away to avoid crossing glances with departing Kent. The trumpet flourishes, the suitors enter, led by or followed by Gloucester either forewarned or just now
Preposterous Poststructuralism 87
noticing that the expected ardor for greeting the suitors has cooled terribly.
We may